Data infrastructure

BERD@NFDI is an initiative to build a powerful platform for collecting, processing, analyzing, and preserving Business, Economic, and Related Data – all in one place. We will facilitate the integrated management of algorithms and data throughout the whole research cycle, with a special focus on unstructured (big) data such as video, image, audio, text, or mobile data.

BERD@NFDI will provide infrastructures for the challenges of expanded empirical research. We will not only foster community building, offer publicly available and online accessible data sets, and enhance data documentation and preservation guided by the FAIR principles. We will also provide an algorithm repository and benchmarks, computing and storage power to analyze (big) data as well as a broad set of APIs to interact with external systems.

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Social scientists are increasingly drawing on web data to analyze social behavior, opinion formation, cultural preferences, or political polarization. Collecting social media data and other digital behavioral data (DBD) up to the standards of social science research is a non-trivial task and often a challenge to individual researchers. GESIS develops innovative methods for the collection of digital behavioral data in the social sciences. In accordance with the proprietary and privacy restrictions that apply, we provide the resulting data for scientific re-use. GESIS offers a range of collected, curated, and augmented datasets; these data are transparent, ready-to-use and often accompanied by additional materials or tools. We concentrate on topical data relevant for the social sciences, training data – e.g., for attribute or opinion detection – or large datasets that can be further mined for individual research purposes.

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“FReDA – The family demographic panel” will be conducted in close cooperation of the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the pairfam consortium. This infrastructure will incorporate the Gender & Generations Programme (GGP) and pairfam in Germany. Half-annual re-interviews of persons aged 18 to 49 years and their partners are at the center of FReDA. This is aimed to enable data users to answer a multitude of research questions in the areas of demographic, family sociology, and family psychology.

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The German Business Panel is a long-term survey panel of the DFG-funded supraregional project “TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency”. The panel systematically and representatively surveys how companies ranging from Dax groups to solo self-employed persons assess questions on current issues. It also measures how the increasing provision of information and increasing regulation in the areas of accounting and taxation affect corporate decision-making and the public. As a comprehensive, long-term survey panel, it will provide data of unprecedented quality for research and help improve regulation and business.

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The German Internet Panel (GIP) is a long-term longitudinal study at the University of Mannheim. The GIP researches individual attitudes and preferences that are relevant in political and economic decision-making processes. For this purpose, more than 3,500 people across Germany are regularly interviewed online on wide range of topics since 2012. State-of-the-art scientific methods are used to ensure an accurate representation of the general population in Germany.

The GIP originated as a central infrastructure project of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 884 “Political Economy of Reforms” and was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2010 to 2021.

The German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) is the central survey program in Germany for the continuous collection and provision of high-quality data for national and international election research. The methodologically diverse surveys of the GLES make it possible to investigate the political attitudes and behavior of eligible voters and candidates. Since its foundation, the GLES has been conducted in close cooperation between the German Society for Electoral Studies (DGfW) and GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

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The GESIS Panel is part of GESIS, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim, Germany. It offers the social science community a unique opportunity to collect survey data within a probability-based mixed-mode panel.

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Since 1993, the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research has been gathering data regarding the innovation behaviour of the German economy on an annual basis. The innovation survey covers firms from various industries including mining, manufacturing, energy- and water- supply, waste disposal, construction, business-related services and distributive services. The survey is representative for Germany and allows projections for the German firm population as well as for individual industries and size classes. The survey is conducted on behalf of BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) in cooperation with infas (Institute of Applied Social Science) and Fraunhofer ISI (Institute for Systems and Innovation Research). The MIP is the German contribution to the European Commission’s Community Innovation Surveys (CIS).

The annual innovation survey is designed as a panel survey including the same firms every year. Sample size varies among the survey years. In 2010 e.g., more than 6000 firms answered the written questionnaire. Every two years the sample is refreshed by a random sample of newly founded firms in order to substitute firms that are closing or left the market through mergers. The MIP provides important information about the introduction of new products, services and processes, expenditures for innovations, ways to achieve economic success with new products, new services and improved processes. In addition, the MIP collects information on a number of competition-related issues which allows studying various topics in industrial economics.

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The ZEW-FDZ offers a novel panel of semi-structured webpage data on company level – the Mannheimer Webpanel. It comprises textual webpage data retrieved from a broad range of German firm websites. A detailed description of the webscraping methods used to harvest the data as well as an examination of the dataset (corpus of German corporate websites) can be found in this discussion paper: Kinne, Jan and Janna Axenbeck (2018), Web Mining of Firm Websites: A Framework for Web Scraping and a Pilot Study for Germany, ZEW Discussion Paper No. 18–033, Mannheim. Download (PDF file, not accessible, 2,36 MB).

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The ZEW Financial Market Survey has been carried out on a monthly basis since December 1991 (written questionnaire: online or postal). It reveals the German financial market’s expectations on the development of six important international financial markets. 350 analysts from banks, insurance companies and large industrial corporations are asked about their expectations on a six-month horizon in specific areas: trend in economic activity, inflation rate, short-term and long-term interest rates, share prices and exchange rates. The financial markets in question are those of Germany, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Eurozone in general. Furthermore, they are asked to assess the profit situation of 13 German industries. The survey consists of two parts: a standard part and a part focussing on current issues. ZEW calculates based on the experts’ expectations the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment. This leading indicator for the economic trend (ZEW Index) is closely followed by the general public. Moreover, ZEW communicates the survey’s detailed results in the monthly ZEW Finanzmarktreport.

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