The Big Table: An information tool on items listed for export controls

Abstract

Global trade data are widely collected and made available by national statistical services and dedicated data providers. JRC has carried out a support task to IAEA to identify main trade data sources and explore uses for safeguards. In this context a software tool has been developed in support to trade analysis. The tool, called The Big Table (TBT), allows IAEA¿s analysts to search control lists, identify items of interest, and relate these to technical documentation and descriptors needed to retrieve relevant trade data. A distinguishing trait of TBT is that it enables searching in an ¿inter-related way¿ a collection of reference documents for export controls on nuclear and nuclear-related items. Reference documents include: regulatory documents, technical handbooks and the Harmonized System, i.e. the taxonomy of goods by the World Customs Organization used by exporters to declare trade to customs. By ¿inter-related¿ search it is meant that, in TBT, semantically related items listed in different documents of the collection are put in correspondence by ad hoc correspondence tables. In this way, any document can be taken as starting point of a search, and retrieve complementary perspectives on items of interest given by other documents in the collection. As such TBT can serve a variety of tasks and communities underpinning export controls, including the rating of items by licensing authorities and commodity identification by customs controls.