Dagstuhl Sprint, October 2017 (Week One)

Introduction

The DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) metadata standard, originally created in 1995 to document social science research data, has in recent years become relevant to new user groups, including the official statistics and medical research communities. In order to respond to these new users, DDI is developing a model-based specification (DDI Version 4) that can be expressed in XML Schema, RDF-S/OWL, relational database schema, and program languages. Such a data model will make it easier to interact with other disciplines and other standards, to understand the specification, to develop and maintain it in a consistent and structured way, and to enable software development that is less dependent on specific DDI versions.

Goals

The overall goal of both DDI workshops in Dagstuhl 2017 is to combine the good and mature parts of the work of the last years in order to have three working functional views, a working class library, the resulting bindings and a working production framework. This will be an important step for the publication of a pilot of DDI 4 which is planned for publication in the middle of 2018. The pilot should prove that the new approaches of DDI 4 work and make sense. This includes especially the model-driven approach, the functional views, and the datum-based data description.

The three planned functional views are Data Description, Data Capture, and Codebook. The goal is to have working functional views with core sets of items (in contrast of functional views which cover everything in the specific area). Additional features can be added to the views in future.

Existing work should be used, refined, and integrated. Start of new work should be minimized and only focus on missing parts which could block the finalization of working components.

Issues in this work – especially missing parts – should be described with underlying reasoning and plan for resolution (including priority level)

All working areas can be understood as a building block for the goal described above. Additionally, work will be done on strategic documents including the plan for a DDI-based infrastructure, the future strategic plan, and mission and guiding principles.