Identifiable objects: standard contents
A report to the Modeling Group from the Technical Committee – 2014-07-

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This document brings together the consensus from the Technical Committee plus other interested modelers and is based on discussions during TC meetings in June/July 2014. The agenda topics included for these meetings included: Identification (separate paper), Name/Label/Description, what objects are referenced, and Administrative metadata. Minutes from these meetings have been posted to the modeler's site.
This document contains information on the following:

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Standard objects for sub-sets of identifiable objects

See "Names and Labels.pptx" for background information provided by Dan Gillman

Background in DDI-L

In creating DDI 3.0, we inherited the idea of Name, Label, and Description from the DDI-C "var". In DDI-C a variable had a required name attribute which generally contained a unique name used by a statistical package, a label used by the statistical package, and a text which allowed for further expansion of the label. Depending upon the software used to create the DDI-C instance and the conventions of the agency creating the document, name could be a duplication of the id and label content could end up either in the label or text depending upon its length, and text might contain a long label or a further description of the variable. Name was carried over in an Identifiable Type as a "local" form of identifier.
In DDI 3.1 a consistent set of objects was applied to objects that were intended to be managed within a registry. This included a standardized XxxName, Label, and Description where Xxx was the object being named (i.e. VariableName). The original Name in the Identifiable Type was changed to a UserID designating it specifically as a local identifier.
In DDI 3.2 this standard set of objects was applied consistently to all managed objects (maintainables and versionables within schemes).
During the usage of these terms in DDI the description of their usage has varied and there has been inconsistency in their applied usage. In addition, there have been changes in the ISO/IEC 11179 description of the use of Name, Label, and Description as they were included in DDI 3.1. For this reason, we asked Dan Gillman to provide a clear conceptual basis for further work in this area. (See "Names and Labels.pptx")

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1. Variable identification within a statistical system:
   1. SAS, SPSS, STATA, R name
   2. Column header in a csv or spreadsheet file for unit level data
2. Variable is an object that uses a specific "term" for display purposes

Administrative Metadata

See AdministrativeObjects_3_2.xslx
This spreadsheet contains the set of Administrative metadata currently found in a DDI 3.2 maintainable and reference. The maintainable in 3.2 is an extension of versionable which itself extends identifiable. Therefore a maintainable contains all of the administrative metadata objects with the exception of the self-describing attributes "isIdentifiable" and "isVersionable".
We made the following assumptions:

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