The Demopædia Encyclopedia on Population is under heavy modernization and maintenance. Outputs could look bizarre, sorry for the temporary inconvenience

Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English volume

Basic document

Multilingual Demographic Dictionary, second unified edition, English vol.
Jump to: navigation, search
Basic document  (BASIC document)


Editing the data usually requires the prior coding 1 of a certain number of entries on the basic document 2. The coding scheme 3 establishes a correspondence between an entry and its translation into numeric or alphabetic codes. The code book collects and describes the coding schemes used with a particular set of basic documents. A coding scheme is usually designed to facilitate later groupings of the data. In contrast, a classification 4 is a mere list of individual codes where each heading 5 is given one or several numbers. After the data have been coded, they constitute a file (213-3*) which can be converted to machine readable form. The second stage in the editing consists in the cleaning 6 of the file, through elimination of errors by validity checks 7 and consistency checks 7; these can be internal checks within each statistical unit (cf. 110-1) or may result from the comparison of different units. After errors have been identified, they may be corrected in the original document or the file by some automatic procedure.

  • 1. Code, n. - code, v. - coding, n.

More...