QUETELET: Critical System for Integration, Digitisation and Retrieval of the Belgian Penal Statistics

The use of penal statistics runs up against many difficulties: almost total absence of complete series, heavy integration and critical work and, above all, published in poorly printed books. The mission of the project «Quetelet.net» is the development of a system allowing the integration and critical availability of these statistics, published by the Belgian system since its founding in 1830. The application takes the form of a dynamic Website. It includes a database, a data entry sub-system permitting the dematerialization of published information towards the database, and a critical retrieval sub-system. One of the most challenging aspects of the project is coping with the temporal evolution of taxonomies. This pilot project is generic and can be transferred to other areas of administrative statistics.