Statistical Database Research Project in Japan and the CAS SDB Project

In this paper, we describe working statistical database systems in Japan. Most are special purpose systems. In 1983, a comprehensive statistical database research project MUSE began in academic societies. In conjunction with it, EPA is going on an SDB development project (CAS SDB project). CAS SDB plans to handle a large amount of statistical summary data and to support a variety of social scientific uses. We describe statistical meta-data problems and a current design for a statistical meta database. We also describe a current implementation of CAS SDB. It was implemented on a relational DBMS and has an interface with SAS. We are now testing the capabilities of CAS SDB in real statistical applications.