The Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) is a partnership between post-secondary institutions and Statistics Canada for improving access to Canadian Data resources. To increase data relevance and to commit to Statistics Canada's modernization mandate of a user centric service delivery, in the spring of 2022 Statistics Canada selected Metadata Technology North America's Rich Data Services (RDS) platform to replace its aging Nesstar server for the delivery of data and metadata to its research communities. Changing a large, actively used, data catalogue is a significant task, and gives tremendous insight into how real-life data management, access, and technological modernization impacts are large national statistical agency.

Gabriel Gellner (Statistics Canada) will discuss the migration process from Nesstar to RDS, the challenges presented and the effort required to migrate data and metadata from one platform to the other. Gabriel will also talk about the aspects of RDS that he believes will make an impact in the DLI community.

Andrew DeCarlo (MTNA) will discuss and demonstrate the new features in RDS that were developed to meet the needs of Statistics Canada including the support of multilingual user interfaces and metadata management, enhanced data searching capabilities, and multivariate numeric and categorical linear regression.