According to requirements Surveyor can run fixed reports on a regular schedule to automatically build a set of time-based snapshots giving you a profile of the evolving data. Fixed reports can also be run in an ad-hoc manner as an when necessary. Using the spreadsheet reporting, Surveyor allows you to develop data analysis in a spreadsheet. Upload the spreadsheet to Surveyor, and it can inject data collected from surveyor forms to provide an up to date set of results. Surveyor's configurable data collection and analysis system accommodates a wide range of applications to provide an internet based survey system within industry and healthcare, and across the public and private sectors.

Surveyor's access control system is used to reflect organisation structures and to configure the availability of information and system functions to each user according to their access rights and the organisational relationships. For example, if data is to be collected in a group of clinics, each data set can be made private to the supplying clinic. However, within each clinic users may be given similar user rights - localised to their own clinic.

Electronic information can have a limited lifetime if care is not taken to protect it. Proprietary formats bind data into where they reside. Exported data is often expensive to reuse as its meaning is lost in the absence of the system in which is was stored. Self describing data using open standards for data description and storage protect the value of your data. Surveyor allows information to be exported using Semantic web technologies that support automated transformation and interpretation. Where possible data is linked to publicly available ontologies and controlled vocabularies making information long lived and robust. This is especially important in long-term studies in health care.

Clinical research and basic science have been hindered by a lack of a consistent technology and the disparate storage of data in a vast range of informatics projects. Moreover, the terminology used in describing such data can be ambiguous and esoteric.

A set of technologies addressing the structuring and querying of data from disparate sources has emerged over the last 5 years. These technologies are finding particular application in medical research and the biosciences as they handle complex interrelated data particularly well.

Surveyor is an opportunity to utilise these technologies to access and integrate these information resources into your collected data. This integration allows searching and querying within your data and across external related data.

Designing a survey form is simple enough once you know what information you need and have worked out the best way to collect this. With Surveyor we include support for survey design to ensure you are collecting the data you need in a form that will allow the outputs from your planned analysis. Our approach is to build a schematic representation of your data that will allow you to check its consistency and allow us to recommend survey form structures that ease analysis.