“A compilation of available data focused on selected aspects of demographic, social, economic and health characteristics … in “data poor” countries… to create a reliable and timely evidence base to inform policy (i.e. a minimum data set). “Data poor” here refers to situations where the data available cannot provide the needed evidence for decision-making, either because of complete or partial absence of the relevant data, or inadequate quality of the data that are available.”

References

https://www.who.int/healthinfo/survey/ageingmds/en/

Note: the definition presented here is derived from epidemiological applications in human health. MDS approaches have also been proposed for plant epidemiological research and have been elaborated agronomy / soil characteristics (eg. Govaerts et al. 2006; Yemefack et al. 2006)