Deadlines
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With 75 registered participants representing 34 organizations, many of whom were new to the DDI community, the 4th Annual North American DDI Conference was held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada April 7-8. The Health Research Data Repository hosted the event, supported by the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta.
The conference program of 15 presentations and 4 workshops reflected a wide variety of potential and practical uses of DDI within the social science community and beyond, such as helping to drive a new health data ecosystem, managing heterogeneous longitudinal weather data, and addressing the needs of geospatial data and time-based media. Keynote addresses were given by Dr. Lawrence Richer, Associate Director of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute, and Dr. Larry Hoyle ("The Evolution of DDI - Concepts and Technology"), Senior Scientist at the University of Kansas Institute for Policy & Social Research. In addition to the program, Colectica and Nooro Online Research partnered to provide a demonstration of DDI’s interoperability by creating, distributing, and documenting the conference’s feedback survey in real-time.
NADDI 2017 will be held at Ithaca, New York on April 5-7, 2016.
Annual Meetings Held in Bergen, Norway
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New Member Representatives
Ben Abrahamse has replaced Katherine McNeill as the member representative for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Tayyeb Akram has replaced Simon Saint-Georges as the member representative for Epidemiology France, Aviesan - ITMO SantPublique. Welcome, Ben and Tayyeb, and thank you for your service, Kate and Simon!
New Premium Membership option
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The next Moving Forward sprints are planned for October at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Germany. The first week will bring together representatives from other metadata standards to review the current DDI work and discuss how best to work collaboratively. The second week will extend and build upon the progress made during the past three years of development, focusing on four main areas of work: creating re-usable multi-purpose documentation; controlled vocabularies; complex data capture and description; and funding proposals.
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Scientific Board Election Results
In May, elections were held for the positions of Chair and Vice-Chair of the Scientific Board. Achim Wackerow (GESIS) was elected as Chair, with Michelle Edwards (CISER) elected as Vice-Chair. The Scientific Board: 1. Contributes to the substantive content of DDI standards and semantic products and approve major version revisions. 2. Evaluates technical proposals through the Alliance standards review process. 3. Undertakes research and testing concerning proposals for DDI standards and semantic products. 4. Develops and promulgates best practices for use of DDI standards and semantic products. 5. Assesses progress and barriers to progress. 6. Suggests future directions and activities for the Alliance. The Technical Committee is a standing committee of the Scientific Board. The Scientific Board also has direct oversight of the Moving Forward project (DDI4).
Announcements
Call for Papers for EDDI16
The 8th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI16) will take place December 6-7, 2016 in Cologne, Germany. EDDI16 is organized jointly by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor. The meeting will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world. This year, the conference organizers are encouraging papers which focus on re-use of software and re-use of administered software. Examples of this could be question banks, re-use of software components and provision of services which foster re-use. Also encouraged are papers which discuss barriers to the creation and uptake and maintenance of such re-use. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or using DDI is invited to attend and present. More information is available on the Conference web page.
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Read-Write-Execute (RWX)
The DDI Community has produced a rich store of DDI and metadata-related publications over the last 20 years. Read-Write-Execute (RWX) will highlight some of these existing publications as well as new work as it is produced. This first column will feature some of the foundations of DDI in scientific literature. (Thanks to Achim Wackerow for his suggestions.) At the same time, a bibliography of DDI articles, working papers, and presentations is being built and is available at Bibsonomy.org (http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/ddialliance?lang=en) with easily reusable bibliographic metadata. This metadata will also be made available on the DDI Alliance website. Suggestions for papers and topics for RWX, or the bibliography, are appreciated and can be sent to: Knut Wenzig, kwenzig@diw.de.
Foundations of DDI in Scientific Literature
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