On January 26, 2026, representatives of the Latvian Data Curators Network and the Shared Service Centre (VPC) Mikus Melderis and Artūrs Svarinskis participated in a professional development workshop “Anonymisation and Synthetic Data – Methods, Tools, and Applications”, which took place in Olten, Switzerland. The event programme addressed issues of data anonymisation methodology and synthetic data generation, as well as technical and legal aspects of these processes.
During the event, it was emphasised that while open data policy is a fundamental aspect of modern research, it is also essential to ensure the protection of private and sensitive data in accordance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Risk-based data anonymisation is an effective solution that allows research data to be made public while guaranteeing the confidentiality of participants and respecting the public interest.
The legal basis for anonymisation and pseudonymisation across the regulatory frameworks of the European Union, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States was examined during the seminar. Experts emphasised that the effectiveness of the methods used directly depends on the specifics of the research and the nature of the data. The main criteria for the quality of anonymisation are minimising the risk of re-identification and preserving the utility of the data for further research.
In the practical part of the workshop, participants had the opportunity to try out the R/RStudio development environment using the sdcMicro package. This tool offers extensive capabilities for transforming direct and indirect identifiers, including data aggregation, information hiding, and adding statistical noise, while maintaining the statistical representativeness of the dataset.
The acquired knowledge, methodological materials and practical R script samples will serve as a basis for strengthening the competencies of data curators in sensitive data management. It is planned that this knowledge will be integrated into the activities of the data curator network and transferred to the Latvian research community, promoting the secure and high-quality circulation of research data.
