‘Information standards’ are the rules that we use to describe and catalogue knowledge resources. These resources include policy or strategy documents, research and evaluation reports, and numerical and non-numerical datasets. If two agencies use the same information standards then they can more easily manage and share resources.

The Observatory develops and maintains information standards that allows it to describe, in a consistent and transparent manner, the resources it manages. It is hoped that these standards will also be linked to any future developments at an  all-Ireland level.

Ireland and Northern Ireland’s Population Health Observatory (INIsPHO) applies at least two types of standards:

• Metadata standards
• Data standards.

“Metadata standards” specify what features of a resource, such as a book’s creator and its subject, are to be recorded and how they should be recorded. The standards use the terms in the Public Health Language (PHL) to encode the subject of a resource.

“Data standards” concern the variables contained in numerical data sources. These variables include the age of a respondent to a survey and the date on which a hospital admission occurred. Data standards enable people to better analyse the variables contained in numerical data sources. Data standards also specify what features of a variable are to be recorded and how they should be recorded. For example, age should be named AGE (rather than AGE_GROUP) and its values should be recoded in five-year age bands rather in ten-year age bands.