Data Management of Confidential Data

Abstract

Social science researchers increasingly make use of data that is confidential because it contains linkages to the identities of people, corporations, etc. The value of this data lies in the ability to join the identifiable entities with external data, such as genome data, geospatial information, and the like. However, the confidentiality of this data is a barrier to its utility and curation, making it difficult to fulfil US federal data management mandates and interfering with basic scholarly practices, such as validation and reuse of existing results. We describe the complexity of the relationships among data that span a public and private divide. We then describe our work on the CED2AR prototype, a first step in providing researchers with a tool that spans this divide and makes it possible for them to search, access and cite such data.