Big Data and Economic Analysis: The Challenge of a Harmonized Database

The real challenge that in the nowadays society needs to be scientifically faced is to accurately handle the enormous flow of information that in an IT world can be tremendously powerful to analyse the social and economic changes. The huge flow of data that private organizations and public administrations are storing in their databases is a precious and important source of information to complete the official statistics yielded by the National Statistics Institutes but not exempt from obstacles and issues that need to be solved. The dimension of private/public databases has to be considered in the Data Science scenario and involves that set of problems related to the so-called Big Data. This chapter provides a first scientific successful attempt to merge administrative databases and official statistical data in the field of research referred to the real estate economy that still suffers the consequences of the dearth of a complete and harmonized data warehouse.