Research project AG/JJ/149 (Research action AG)
INSTAP is a project financed by the Belgian Science Policy in the context of its AGORA programme. Organized on a two year scale, its principal goal is assembling all Belgian Penal Statistics published since 1830 in Quetelet.net, an application developed in an earlier federal project. In 2008, Quetelet.net succeeded in presenting a prototype allowing the distribution of statistical data, while taking its evolutive dimension into account. At end of that project, a thirty years sample had been encoded for test and demonstration purposes.
The first phase of the INSTAP project deals exclusively with the latest statistics generated, published digitally. To digest this data, the prototype must preliminarily be equipped with a module permitting the transfer of digital tables (pdf, xls, doc, etc.) without their figures being re-encoded manually. The second phase will in turn deal with the rest of the 135 years, not yet treated, following the same process that was set up in Quetelet.net. During these two phases, the software will moreover have to be consolidated and tested, so that it best corresponds to users' needs.
This project, directed by the Belgian Science Policy, the SPF Justice and the National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology (INCC) is being set up via a multi-disciplinary university partnership: the Centre for Law and Justice History (CHDJ) of UCL, the Laboratory of Database Applications Engineering (LIBD) and the Technology Assessment Research Unit (CITA) of the FUNDP.
