Gathering Data from Rural Schools

To organize a budget planning process, the administration of the Novosibirsk Region had to collect statistical data from the regional educational institutions, including rural schools. We created a toolkit for generating report templates to be filled in by the institutions, encrypted, transmitted to the administration, and added to a single data store.

Industry:

Government

Region:

Russia

Technologies:

Java, MS Office API

Volume:

1 man-years

Problem

There were various types of statistical data that had to be collected from educational institutions in the required formats.

In 2004, some rural schools still had no Internet connection, which greatly complicated the procedure. Moreover, some of them were equipped with outdated PCs that did not support modern software.

The form and properties of collectible data also varied from year to year, which required developing a solution that would help educational institutions to meet the new requirements.

Solution

The solution consisted of three elements:

An editor that provided functionality for creating and editing templates for the data reports
Lightweight client software that took the templates as input and converted them into forms that were then to be filled with data. The solution was adapted to run on very old hardware.
A central data store for collecting data produced by the client software and running statistical queries against those data.