Strategic aims

1. A new release for regions with improved usability.

2. A conversion tool to Eurobarometer and NUTS and new datasets.

3. A ‘software paper’ in the Journal of Open Research. We can be publication ready in 1-2 months.

4. Acknowledgment from a national statistical authority. For example, an EU statistical authority publishes our NUTS tables for information purposes. Acknowledgements from scientific users (our data passed peer-review in various disciplines.)

5. Journal of Statistical Software. This will require a longer time, and several validation points for our data.

6. Acknowledgement from Eurostat

Next Contributions

• Create an R-regions-literature.bib for the references we want to use in the publications.

• Create a reproducible workflow to import LAU/NUTS correspondence tables.

• Review and test the validate_geo_code() function - the manual checks will have to be published in vignette or some other form, and be available for future publication reviewers.

• The conversion function must be reviewed for all exceptions, particularly regarding small countries with no or few NUTS divisions like Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, etc. This description should be part of the package description.

• Review and test the impute_down() function and clearly describe when it can be used, and when it cannot be used.

• Clearly define the relationship between country boundaries (NUTS0), NUTS, LAU and ISO 3166-2. What are these, what are the similarities, differences, and how we work with them. Also include a clear definition what sort of further topologies can be added by contributors.

• Create an API connection or a reader to the ISO website for all Eurobarometer, Arabbarometer and Afrobarometer countries, to have a real-time validation to all ISO 3166-2 countries.

• Create a sound description of the problem of sub-national boundaries, topologies, nomenclatures, including their brief history. <this can be reused in shorter details in the package vignette, and both planned publications.>

• Finalize the Arabbarometer tutorial.

• Create a fully harmonized European / African dataset on climate change.

Eurobarometer metaadata vocabulary

• Create a conversion table for Eurobarometer and regions/NUTS. Publish this data table as a separate data publication, as it will be large, and not core to the regions or the retroharmonize project, but relevant to both. Contact GESIS and Kantar with this document (which will be a description of our work, plus a table, for example, made available on Zenodo.)

Journal of Open Research

We are aiming at a software paper in JORS. This is a short, informative, peer-reviewed publication highlighting the re-use potential of our work.

Journal of Statistical Software

This is our final aim, to make our software a generally accepted tool, hopefully even by Eurostat.