Demetra+

The Demetra+ project is governed by the Eurostat. Unlike other software development efforts done under an open source license, the Demetra+ project was not initiated by a community or a single developer, but started as an extension to the active role played by Eurostat (and in particular SA Steering Group) in the promotion, development and maintenance of a statistical analysis software solution. The SA Steering Group, which consists of Eurostat-ECB high level group of experts from NSIs and NCBs, has been promoting for several years the development of freely available Demetra solution for seasonal adjustment to be used within ESS.[1] The SA Steering Group is responsible also for facilitating collaboration between separate organizations interested in development of SA tools and has ultimate control over the whole project. Although the software itself will be made available under an open source license, participation in development is contingent upon the decision of Steering Group. At the moment, it is decided that no typical open source development and testing is foreseen. The development of the software has been outsourced to the Department of Statistics of the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), and, for the moment, NBB remains a solely developer of Demetra+. In addition, the User Testing Group has been set up, with main tasks to supervise the implementation of the guidelines and user requirements. The User Testing Group is also responsible for issuing recommendations for new requirements and making decisions on adoption or rejection of new requirements not in line with the project guidelines. The Demetra+ community has been established on OSOR environment for reporting and exchange of experience between the members of the User Testing Group itself, as well as for communication with the development team in NBB.

The Demetra+ allows developers to write implementation for:

• time series providers and browsers,
• repository for the definitions of SA processing,
• storage (or further processing) of the results,
• diagnostics on the SA estimations,
• summary (reporting) of a complete SA processing,
• data formatting (drag/drop and copy/paste).

In Workspace menu from the Main menu the user can create new Workspaces, open an existing project in a new window, save the file, activates and deactivates the panels, open workspace recently saved and closes an open project. Tools menu is divided into three parts: Container for displaying data; Tool Window for charts and data transformation; Options for diagnostic and output options that can be set by user. Window menu offers the following functions: Floating, Tabbed, Tile vertically and Tile horizontally for the type of arrange all windows; Skinning for graphical appearance of Demetra+ and Documents options which offers some additional options for organising windows.

The key parts of the Demetra+ are:

1. the browsers panel, which presents the available time series;
2. the workspace panel, which shows information used or generated by the software;
3. a central blank zone that will contain actual analyses;
4. two auxiliary panels at the bottom of the application: TSProperties contains the current time series (from the browsers’ panel) and Logs contains logging information.