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Call for Papers for NADDI 2017, April 6-7 (Pre-Conference workshop April 5)
A Call for Papers is now open for the 5th Annual North American DDI Users Conference hosted by the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) and The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research The theme for this year’s conference, “Metadata Across the Research Data Lifecycle," emphasizes the benefits of metadata creation early in the research data lifecycle, as well as its subsequent re-use throughout.
Aimed at individuals working in and around data and metadata, NADDI 2017 seeks submissions of presentations and posters that highlight the use of DDI and other metadata standards within research projects, survey operations, academic libraries, and data archives. Also invited are proposals that address the increasing need for interoperability of standards in research data management and the leveraging of DDI to facilitate data discovery and data integration. Presentations of an applied nature are encouraged—how are you working with DDI and metadata generally within the larger framework of research data management and the research data lifecycle? Submissions of a more technical nature are also encouraged, as well as presentations on the DDI standard itself and its continued development.
For further details about the conference, please visit http://naddiconf.org. The deadline for submissions is February 17, 2017. We hope to see you there!
8th Annual EDDI Conference Held in Cologne, December 2016
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The DDI Alliance recently announced the conducted a Public Review of XKOS, an RDF Vocabulary which extends the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) for the needs of statistical classifications. It does so XKOS extends SKOS in two main directions. First, it defines a number of terms that enable the representation of statistical classifications with their structure and textual properties, as well as the relations between classifications. Second, it refines SKOS semantic properties to allow the use of more specific relations between concepts. Those specific relations can be used for the representation of classifications or for any other case where SKOS is employed. XKOS adds the extensions that are desirable to meet the requirements of the statistical community. Links to the specification and instructions for comment are More information can be found at http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/RDF/XKOS. We are eager to obtain feedback from the DDI and RDF communities on this vocabulary. The comment period is open until February 15, 2017, and we hope to hear from you.
RWX: Top Impact Publications from the Last 20 Years
By Knut Wenzig
The DDI Community has produced a rich store of DDI and metadata-related publications. Read-Write-Execute (RWX) will highlight some of these existing publications as well as new work as it is produced. The first column featured some of the foundations of DDI in scientific literature. This second column will revisit some of the top impact publications related to DDI from the last 20 years.
It is not surprising that the DDI publications with many citations cover more high level discussions rather than specific technical details. But revisiting conceptual fundamentals or policy goals, comparing standards, and evaluating approaches should also be done
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if one is currently planning the next project. So, let’s take a look at some of the top cited DDI publications over the last 20 years.
When Ryssevik and Musgrave (2001) write about their social science dream machine, they were thinking about the distributed NESSTAR system, which is based on DDI. But there is nothing wrong with the idea of an “integrated resource discovery gateway and search system to identify and locate these resources” which consists of not less than “all existing empirical data” (what is today called federated search). And being able to convert an “extensive amount of metadata … totally integrated with the data as such” to a number of formats and copy them to a local machine is a reasonable wish. The same holds true with “an efficient feedback system to the body of metadata, allowing the user to add to the collecting memory of a data set”. Even “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship” (doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18) from 2016, which are considered to be state of the art, do not cover the range of features Ryssevik and Musgrave describe.
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For Jeffrey et al. (2014), who describe the CERIF approach to design a research information management system, domain specific metadata standards build the lowest of three levels of information. The first level consists of information on research output (organized by flat metadata like Dublin Core similar to a catalogue card). The second level is built by contextual metadata, which can generate the discovery metadata of level one and point to the domain metadata of level three (which could be DDI). The contextual metadata hold information about base entities (e.g., persons and publications) and connect them using a semantic layer with flexible link entities, which can express roles (defined by a term which captures the semantics and a controlled vocabulary to which the term belongs (p. 10) and have a start and end date). Using this semantic layer a publication can have an author, a publication date, and even a country of publication (using so called localisation entities).
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References (also available atBibsonomy)
Arzberger, P., Schroeder, P., Beaulieu, A., Bowker, G., Casey, K., Laaksonen, L., Moorman, D., Uhlir, P. & Wouters, P. (2004). Promoting Access to Public Research Data for Scientific, Economic, and Social Development. Data Science Journal, 3, 135-152. doi:10.2481/dsj.3.135
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A bibliography of DDI articles, working papers, and presentations is being built and is available at Bibsonomy.org 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,