Designing geodatabases for the general authority for statistics of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Date

2016-05

Authors

Alghamdi, Khalid Abdullah

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Abstract

Developing a new system of both statistical surveys and geographic entities for the General Authority for Statistics (GaStat) in Saudi Arabia is needed to respond to fast growing statistical data as well as to be more relevant with users and related resources through providing a diversity of datasets. This project developed a new geodatabase conceptual model for the GaStat by adopting the methods used by the United States Census Bureau. The new model consists of two main components: statistical surveys and geographic entities. First, statistical surveys use the methods of field surveys, partnership agreements, and self-response to feed the database in the Information Bank, which is a data warehouse and will be used in GaStat. More specifically, additional types of statistical surveys are identified and included in the proposed model. These types include the Saudi Community Survey, Saudi Housing Survey, Saudi Income Survey, Saudi Spending Survey, Saudi Economic Survey, Saudi Industry Survey, Saudi Agricultural Survey, and the Saudi Employment Survey. Further, a series of formatting time methods including quarters, one year, three years, and five years is used in the statistical systems in order to provide up-to-date information. Second, similar to the geographic entities used in U.S. Census Bureau, geographic entities for the GaStat are classified into two groups: legal and administrative entities, and statistical entities based on their corresponding geographic subdivision, and they are further organized in a hierarchical structure. This design should provide a powerful tool for collecting information and creating a standard set for the GaStat in order to retrieve the requests from users. More specifically, the legal and administrative entities include the country and its provinces, governorates, holy areas, economic zones, ZIP code areas, school districts and voting districts. Statistical entities include regions, statistical tracts, statistical block groups, statistical blocks, urban areas, urban growth areas, places, sample-data areas and governorates subdivisions. Additionally, a unique reference numeric code is used to integrate between the data from both statistical surveys and geographic entities. The proposed geodatabase model is expected to address the limitations of the current systems in the GaStat.

Description

A project research Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in GEOSPATIAL SURVEYING ENGINEERING from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS.

Keywords

Geographic Entities, Statistical Surveys, Geodatabases

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