About SIRAD

By its very nature, data that impacts the lives of the public is highly sensitive and personal. Responsible research means protecting the privacy of the people behind the data. Of course, without being able to cross-reference data on specific individuals, combined data from multiple sources can become useless noise.

That’s where SIRAD comes in – Secure Infrastructure for Research with Administrative Data. SIRAD is an integration framework that cleans and organizes data for research without jeopardizing privacy or security. To see a worked example of SIRAD, take a look at this posting on the RIPL GitHub.

SIRAD strips an individual’s data of personally identifiable information, “PII,” before making it available to human researchers. PII is replaced with a global anonymized identifier, a high-tech “nickname” for researchers to reference when joining data on an individual person, without ever knowing that person’s actual identity.