Design Principles

A set of design principles has been identified during the course of the development of DDI 4, The list is shown below:

Design

The model:
  • is developed in an agile, modular and iterative manner
  • is responsive to community needs to produce actionable metadata
  • should balance complexity with functionality and understandability
  • is extensible and strives towards compatibility between different versions
  • is maximally interoperable with relevant community standards
  • supports a plurality of implementations

Documentation

The documentation of the model:
  • is clear, complete, and timely
  • is concise, comprehensible, accessible, and useable by multiple communities
  • provides justification for design decisions.
  • provides reference and functional perspectives

Capability

The model and its documentation:
  • support the discovery, reuse, exchange, and sharing of (meta)data
  • support the conceptualization, capture, production, management, and analysis of (meta)data
  • support audit and reproducibility across the (meta)data lifecycle