vol29-4.indd 4 IASSIST Quarterly Winter 2005 Editor’s Notes Welcome to the fourth issue of the IASSIST Quarterly vol. 29. The true year 2005 ended some time ago, but IASSIST is now ready for entering the fourth decade of IASSIST Quarterly. The IQ has changed through the years and will hopefully continue to do so in the future. Since the beginning, much more IASSIST communication is now available. Besides the printed IQ and the yearly IASSIST conference, we have the IASSIST mailing list, local IASSIST meetings, the IASSIST website for further information (and the IQ), and the blog. So browse around at http://iassistdata.org and visit the IASSIST weblog (blog) - IASSIST Communiqué – at http://iassistblog.org. Happy surfing. The first article is a paper presented at the IASSIST 2006 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the session: “Moving Beyond Data to Networked Knowledge.” Julie Lamb, from the Department of Sociology at University of Surrey in the UK, is the author of “Disseminating Survey Information in the Networked World: A UK Resource.” The paper discusses the development and use of the Question Bank, an innovative Web resource which is used to teach students and researchers about UK social surveys with a focus on large-scale quantitative surveys. Currently, the Question Bank contains the full questionnaires for over 50 surveys produced by agencies such as the Office for National Statistics and the National Centre for Social Research. The Question Bank supports reuse of survey questions and the accompanying coding frames, including information about the surveys, and often this is used as a benchmark for new surveys. The second article is a paper that was also presented at the IASSIST 2006 conference. The paper titled “Documenting Religion Worldwide: Decreasing the Data Deficit,” by Brian J. Grim, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), and Roger Finke, Pennsylvania State University and Association of Religion Data Archives, was presented in the session “Compare and Contrast: Using Cross- National Data.” The paper is a presentation of the ARDA with data on 238 different countries and territories and some ARDA-coded measures. The International Social Survey Programme, World Values Survey, and the General Social Survey are among the well-known datasets in the archive. The article not only discusses the archive, but also demonstrates research carried out on ARDA materials by the authors in constructing and analyzing some religious indexes. I noticed another demonstration implicit in the article. The ISSP, WVS, and GSS also are available from other archives, so we have two typologies of archive materials: 1) the traditional archives that are geographically based (national, regional, university, etc.) and 2) the subject archives, of which the Association of Religion Data Archives is an example. Some redundancy can be solved with links to central sites, other problems will be more problematic like the version problem of extended metadata being constructed at separate archives. The last article is from the 2006 conference session “The Big Picture: GIS Data Challenges and Solutions.” The paper titled “Consideration for Information Security Issues in Geospatial Information Services of Local Governments” was presented by Makoto Hanashima from the Institute for Areal Studies in Tokyo and the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama. The author leads off with how GIS has changed from being “Geographic Information System” to being “Geospatial Information Service.” The GIS has serious aspects of IT security – mostly because the GIS is part of the infrastructure for local government. Security is mostly about securing the geospatial information service and protecting the geospatial information as public property, and that the service must not threaten the safety of the public. Based on a threat analysis, a set of safeguards for the baseline security of the geospatial information service is selected. The paper relates closely to “ISO/IEC TR 13335 Guidelines for the Management of IT Security (GMITS)” and provides an overview of the many points herein. The workflow of the research carried out has the following main points: A) discussion of IT security policy regarding the geospatial information service, B) outline risk analysis, C) making of a safeguard catalog, D) making of a baseline security model for geospatial information service, and E) proposal of a baseline security guideline prototype. In this process the paper also contains a list of “specific threats” such as tampering with and forgery of data, illegal copying and distribution of data, and attack by an unauthorized service. The safeguards for “specific threats” of GIS will be included in further research. Articles for the IASSIST Quarterly are most welcome. Articles can be papers from IASSIST conferences, from other conferences, from local presentations, discussion input, etc. Contact the editor via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Karsten Boye Rasmussen, August 2006