Accessing georeferenced data
Accessing georeferenced SOEP data
The GeoLAB and the Leibniz ScienceCampus team work towards secure remote access to georeferenced SOEP data from anywhere in the world. Until that access is in place, the regional SOEP data is obtained through DIW Berlin: the data access page of the SOEP sets out the routes, the conditions and the application forms.
Learning more about other georeferenced sources
Two search tools help you find out which variable or indicator exists, and which institution publishes it. Both are metadata search: you describe a concept in plain language, you get ranked descriptions back, and every hit links out to the institution that publishes the data. Neither tool stores or serves measurement values or microdata.
Georeferenced regional data
GeoDB Geodata Index
Regional indicators, statistical tables and datasets for Germany: INKAR, the Regionaldatenbank and GENESIS-Online table catalogues, Zensus 2022, the Regionalatlas, the Deutschlandatlas, Bundesagentur-für-Arbeit indicators, the Breitbandatlas including its grid-cell rasters, hospital registers, the Unfallatlas, public-transport datasets and more.
Ask for a concept and filter by source, spatial level, theme and year. Every result says what its link opens: the indicator itself, the table it sits in, the statistic, the dataset, or the portal’s entry page.
Survey variables
SOEP Variable Finder
Variable metadata of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-Core). Ask in German or English and get the variables that measure a concept, with dataset, label, value labels and the survey years in which they appear.
Metadata only. Access to the SOEP microdata itself requires a data-use agreement with DIW Berlin; the finder tells you which variable to ask for.
How the search works
- A multilingual bi-encoder embeds your question and the metadata into the same vector space,
- a cross-encoder reranks the candidates,
- and a lexical signal plus a small source prior settles the final order.
Retrieval is semantic and therefore imperfect: verify a hit against the official documentation before you rely on it.
Improving the search
Searches are recorded anonymously so that we can see which questions the tools answer badly and fix the ranking. Nothing about a search is linked to you: no IP address, no user agent, no cookie and no session identifier. See the privacy statement.
Sources and citation
The indexed sources and their attribution requirements are listed under Data sources and attribution. Both tools are open source and archived with a DOI, the GeoDB Geodata Index as 10.5281/zenodo.21134145 and the SOEP Variable Finder as 10.5281/zenodo.21134306; each tool also shows its citation in its own footer.