In the DASTAT database system, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) statistically evaluates and records the structure and development of research expenditures of the federal government and publishes it in the Federal Report on Research and Innovation as well as in the BMBF data portal. Therefore, data on research expenditures of all German federal government departments are prepared, managed, updated, and provided for evaluations, from a range of aspects and arranged according to budget title. The data originate, one the one hand, from the project database PROFI from which the single projects are transferred to DASTAT and semi-automatically aggregated according to their title. On the other hand, data are collected from all German federal government departments.
The database DASTAT includes budgetary expenditure as well as actual expenditure on science, research, and development in the context of institutional or project funding relating to recipient groups, funding areas and funding priorities (according to the Federal Government's planning system). Furthermore, the regional distribution (by Federal Länder) of R&D expenditure can be evaluated.
DASTAT was designed by the BMBF and there it has been used since the 1990’s. In 1999 the DZHW (formerly known as HIS GmbH) was assigned to build a web application for this purpose. Since then, DASTAT is content-wise and technically maintained by the DZHW, which includes different complex applications for data collection from all German federal government departments, for data management/updates and data evaluation. The system is only available for usage in the BMBF and selected users in the Federal Government sector.
The reporting system FOSTAT is used to generate and display tables. As of 2002, it had been developed originally to provide printing templates for the table section of the Federal Report on Research and Innovation and for reporting purposes. Therefore, data from DASTAT are administered in the database as well as other statistics from areas like research and development, education, macroeconomics or the labour market which are collected by different institutions. By now, the system is used in close conjunction to the BMBF data portal .
