Database of demographic indicators for countries of the world and regions of Russia: the latest experience

The paper deals with 3 topics: 1) Overview of existing sources of information on population. It covers databases: UN world population prospects, Eurostat, World health organization, Statistics Sweden, Institut National Etudes Démographiques, Human Mortality Database, and a series of others. The sources are analyzed using more than twenty quality criteria – user interface, list of countries and indicators covered, age groups of population, data formats and precision, periodicity of updating, etc. 2) Description of the Database of demographic indicators for countries of the world and regions of Russia under development at the Institute of Demography of the National Research University Higher School of Economics: the principles of data collection from different sources, methods of formation of the data cubes, metadata for these arrays, the set of indicators currently covered, the reference files for coding, ... 3) New features distinguishing this Database from another ones, examples of its use for specific data queries and modes of work. They display several know-how options, including formation of query result from the several sources specified by the user and elimination of erroneous values “on-the-fly”, recalculation of values of the indicator in the case of diverse units of measurement used in different sources.