The EQ-Software project aims to study the instruments and the process of statistical data collection in order to produce knowledge and tools to help improve the quality of the data, and reduce economic costs and time to have data ready for analysis.

The EQ-Software is a set of tools to assist in the process of collecting data of census and surveys. Its main characteristic is the representation of the questionnaire in electronic form, which let you taking advantage of various technologies to make interviews, such as PDA, web, phone or even paper. 

To assist you in the various tasks of data collection process, the EQ-Software consists of various modules described in the following points.

• EQ-Design. It is the program that helps the researcher to design a questionnaire in a friendly way.
• EQ-Control. Supports the fieldwork coordinator to manage the computers used to perform interviews (called collectors), to integrate the collected data in a database, and export it to popular programs for statistical analysis.
• EQ-Collector. It is the program that helps the enumerator to conduct interviews. The EQ-Software can work with an arbitrary amount of EQ-Collectors, one for each particular technology. For example, to date, it includes the EQ-Collector for Palm OS, EQ-Collector for Windows Mobile, EQ-Collector for PC and EQ-Collector for web.

All EQ-Software modules perform different operations with the same questionnaire, therefore, a single questionnaire -without applying any changes- can be used for example to collect part of the sample with PDAs and the rest by web. The questionnaire must be written so that computer programs can understand it. The EQ-Software project has created a notation based on XML named Electronic Questionnaire Markup Language (EQML). It can represent both simple and complex questionnaires. A questionnaire written in EQML is called electronic questionnaire and the EQ-Software name make reference specifically to software that works with electronic questionnaires. The following picture shows the EQ-Software's modules and their relationship.