Interoperating civil registration of death and census data: old age and marriage as categories of analysis

As part of the project Death and Burial Data: Ireland 1864–1922 (DBDIrl), a web application was created in DIME, a low-code web application development environment. DIME is based on the popular IDE Eclipse and utilizes three distinct graphical model types (data model, process model and GUI model) as Domain Specific Language (DSL). Web applications are defined by means of these models in the DIME integrated modelling environment in a simple way, and these models are used to generate the web application code that is then deployed and made available to the users. This paper provides an overview of how we use a web application created in DIME, a low-code application development tool to establish interoperability between Irish historical civil registration of death data and Irish cross-sectional decennial census data from 1901 and 1911. The former data collections are complex and require manual interventions like transcription and considerable cleaning to render them machine readable, the latter are fully transcribed. Here we present a case study concerning the analysis of deaths in old age in Dublin City and how they correlate with census returns. We then turn our attention to a use case of marital status and the algorithmic problems caused by irregular replies in census data. Our objective was to test how DIME could replicate the decisions taken by domain experts using old age and marital status as the primary linkage criteria.