The main features of ASSO is

• to use, create, propagate and model statistical concepts by Symbolic Objects, for user friendly dissemination and best practice demonstration transfer,
  
• to improve the building of symbolic data from a Relational Database or directly,
  
• to help the user in analysing administrative data,
  
• to introduce structured statistical metadata in the description of data required by data consumers, thus ensuring the quality of statistical results,
  
• to add new visualisation facilities for user-friendly Human/Machine interface,
  
• to add new methods for handling, design or statistical analysis of symbolic data and help the user in analysis results,
  
• to add new measures of dissimilarity between Symbolic Objects and of consensus between classifications of Symbolic Objects,
  
• to add new methods of unsupervised and supervised classification extended to symbolic data as input and to Symbolic Objects as output and
  
• to give tools for the study of quality, stability and robustness of the methods.

Users have been concerned from the beginning to the end of the project. They heve defined data type and problems. They have worked with experts of the methods to suggest methodology. They have permanently evaluated the progress of the project and prototypes. They have also evaluated the final product with benchmarks.

Evaluation of the results have been done permanently from the user point of view. Users have evaluated the software prototype as well as the user manual and the help facility. Two Peer Reviews have been planned.