The Special MTN Monitoring (SMM)
With a view to complementing the AGM; CBS-XI (Cairo, 1996) decided to implement the SMM. Taking into account the limited resources available at WWW centres to carry out the monitoring activities, CBS agreed to share the workload of the SMM between the MTN centres.
One of the main features of the SMM is that the sets of messages (also called raw data) provided by the various MTN monitoring centres are processed by a pre-analysis centre (unique for each type of data). This feature aims at eliminating the discrepancies in the availability of data reported by monitoring centres due to differences in the implementation of monitoring procedures like it is the case for the present annual global monitoring, primarily due to different methods of counting the reports. The objective of the pre-analysis is to prepare files having a data-base structure and containing the information extracted from all the sets of messages provided by the monitoring centres. The pre-analysis files represent a unique reference for each type of data for further analysis. One advantage of the SMM is that, when a question is raised on specific bulletins, it is always possible to access the raw data and read the complete text of the bulletins as received by the monitoring centres. The SMM provides a complete monitoring information at the report and bulletin levels for any further analysis.
The SMM is carried out four times a year: 1-15 January, April, July and October. The responsibilities taken by the MTN centres are given in the hereunder Table A and Table B.