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Welcome New Member: Statistics Canada
We are excited to welcome our newest Full Member, Statistics Canada!
DDI 4 Review Period
This is a reminder that we are coming up to the end of the projected 3 month period for the DDI 4 Prototype Review Period. Please submit your issues and comments before Monday, February 4, 2019.
EDDI 2018 Conference
The 10th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI18) was held December 4-5, 2018. EDDI18 was organized jointly by SOEP - The German Socio-Economic Panel, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor, and hosted by SOEP (The Socio-Economic Panel) at DIW (German Institute for Economic Research), Berlin, Germany. The program is available on the conference website.
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UNECE Supporting Standards Group
The DDI Alliance has participated in recent UNECE groups on supporting metadata standards.
Mari Kleemola participated in the Workshop on the Modernisation of Official Statistics, which was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on 27-28 November 2018. The workshop was attended by representatives from 29 countries and organisations. All documents and presentations are available from the Workshop wiki (https://statswiki.unece.org/x/HAFNDQ).
Jay Greenfield has been participating in the Supporting Standards Group
Moving Forward: Berlin Report
Insert sprint final report. EDDI 2018 Sprint Confluence page with the final report.
Moving Forward: Ottawa
DDI 4 Core Sprint in the margins of the North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference, from 22 to 24 April 2019.
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DDI 4 Core Overview and Scope
The work on producing the DDI 4 Core was launched so that, following the Prototype review, some of the core features of the DDI 4 work could be made ready for production release, recognizing that with available resources a more narrow scope was desirable. Emphasis was placed on short-term delivery: the Modeling, Representation, Testing (MRT) working group has allowed itself a year to complete the work on the initial core release, with delivery of a final deliverable ready for review and release at the end of December 2019.
DDI has always faced the requirement of dealing with a large range of data, both for archival purposes
and to provide support for the entire production lifecycle to large studies and statistical agencies. The
result of this work is a model which in many important respects is domain-independent. Recent
developments in the research world are placing a greater emphasis on cross-domain integration of data,
and data coming from new sources, some of it in unfamiliar forms (e.g., “big data,” social media, sensor
data, etc.). Social Science is no different from other domains – the DDI community is faced with a
requirement for a more flexible ability to describe and manage, now available in a wider variety of forms.
The DDI 4 Core is intended to provide useful functionality in response to this requirement. In
presentations, review comments, and discussions it has become apparent that some aspects of the DDI 4
model included in the DDI 4 Prototype are of especially high value. Identified features include the
conceptual aspects of variables and classifications, the datum-oriented description of data, and the use
of the process model to describe data lineage (the processing involved in the provenance of data). These
same features have been identified as of interest by participants at recent Dagstuhl workshops on the
subject of cross-domain data integration, with a further emphasis on alignment with external standards
and the use of a UML model as a primary deliverable.
The DDI 4 Core will include not only the XML and RDF syntax representations, but will also deliver the
UML from which they are derived in the form of Canonical XMI, a portable, tool-independent expression
of the model. This not only makes DDI available for representation in other syntaxes and systems, but
provides a stable basis for the maintenance of the model into the future.
User-oriented subsets of the DDI 4 model are provided by the inclusion of Functional Views, organized to
support the application of DDI to specific tasks. This approach was employed in the Prototype, and will
be carried forward into DDI 4 Core in a refined form, having both a technical and documentary
expression. In addition, high-level documentation aimed at introducing the model to adopters has been
added. Together, these should make the DDI 4 Core more adoptable and easier to approach.
Because of the use of DDI 4 Core for cross-domain integration, and for other purposes, some key
external standards have been selected as candidates for specific alignment (PROV-O for provenance,
GSBPM for process description, and DCAT for data discovery). Documentation of alignment with this
small set of selected standards will be part of the deliverable package. The use of existing RDF
vocabularies in the RDF syntax representation of the model is anticipated, as a needed feature of
alignment with standards/best practice in the Linked Data domain.
The idea that DDI 4 Core be re-branded to reflect its intended use has been discussed: DDI-Codebook
and DDI-Lifecycle have brands which reflect their intended use, while DDI 4 Core does not. A re-branding
would communicate to users the purpose of the new release, and minimize confusion as to which
version of the standard is best suited for their applications - currently, the use of the version number
indicates an erroneous relationship between versions 3 and 4 which is causing some confusion among
the potential users of the new standard release, as it did when earlier releases were referred to as “DDI
2” and “DDI 3”. (Suggestions have been along the lines of "DDI - Integration," "DDI - Cross-Domain," etc.
Identifying a better name for the DDI 4 Core will need further exploration and conversation with the
Marketing group and others.)
New DDI-compliant tool: web-based Questionnaire Design and Development Tool (QDDT)
New DDI-compliant tool: web-based Questionnaire Design and Development Tool (QDDT). With funding from the EU, QDDT replaces the current paper-based Word template used to document the European Social Survey's questionnaire design process. More info: https://github.com/DASISH/qddt-client/wiki
Sponsorships
ESS, ESRA, IASSIST
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