DDI-CDI Process Review
- Wendy Thomas
The purpose of this review is to examine the process of transforming the EA XMI into the canonical XMI and from there to the various implementation syntaxes. This is being done as there were changes in this process between the last public review and the presentation of the final package to the Technical Committee for the purpose of preparing the product for a vote for publication.
The documents at the end of this page are not part of the current publication package but provides production information you will need for your review. We are particularly interested in the following topics in relationship to the generation of multiple syntax representations of the DDI-CDI model:
specific technical review for alignments and model representation
style of the generated syntaxes (Normalized UML, OWL, JSON, etc.)
Expression of common content across DDI products:
Identification
Referencing
Sequencing
External Controlled Vocabulary usage
Ability to run the script (UCMIS)
Following is a segment of the email submitting DDI-CDI to the Technical Committee for review and preparation for a publication vote. It includes links to the materials you will need for review.
TO FILE AN ISSUE:
Click HERE for an issue form. Please add the label “RC2” to assist the CDI Working Group with identifying issues from this review. You need to have an account in Atlassian to file an issue for any of the project management groups. If you have an account (it does not have to be for DDI), log in to have access to filing a new issue.
If you do not have an account, follow the link below to the issue tracker and click on ->] in the upper right corner. Follow the instructions (you will have several options including “Can’t log in? Create an account”). Follow the link for Project management group for any product, sign in, and file your issue.
Since the first Candidate Release was submitted, the DDI-CDI specification has gone through further implementation and testing, including a pre-production implementation at UKDA of the variable descriptions and data structures (in both XML and RDF syntaxes), another proof-of-concept using the Process description portion of the specification in combination with DDI Lifecycle at the European Social Survey, combining social, environmental, and climate data as part of the EOSC Future "Climate Neutral and Smart Cities" project, and has further been implemented at Sikt (SPSS and Stata transformation to DDI-CDI) and at the workshop in Dagstuhl (a prototype CSV-to-DDI generator was developed, for use by the UN Statistical Division, as part of the development of the Cross Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF) effort.
These implementations have resulted in some issues which have also been addressed. Combined with earlier efforts, we feel that the current spec is improved, and that we have confidence that it can be implemented as intended.
Please be aware that the DDI-CDI WG is in process (along with TC and related efforts) to migrate from Bitbucket to GitHub as a repository. This means that URLs for some references in the documentation will need to be updated before final release. Please contact us with any questions about this - it is a known issue. Further, we are actively working to make sure that all namespaces included in the specification are available in an appropriate way, in line with earlier discussions with TC.
The second Candidate Release specification can be found at:
Bitbucket repository: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-cdi-resources/ddi-cdi/ This site is missing the .ttl files in build/ecoding/ontology
Download package: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-cdi-resources/ddi-cdi/get/7f878df30ba2431d809c0acd9d00eeea09d3ee96.zip DOWNLOAD THIS FILE to obtain full set of .ttl files
The field-level documentation can be viewed in a browser at: https://ddi-cdi-resources.bitbucket.io/2024-03-12/field-level-documentation/
The release includes the following items:
(1) Overview specification document in PDF
(2) The model expressed in Canonical XMI
(3) The field-level documentation, covering the model and all syntax representations (W3C XML Schema, OWL/RDFS in JSON-LD and Turtle)
(4) Syntax representation files (W3C XML Schema, OWL/RDFS in JSON-LD and Turtle)
(5) XML examples for a Process description and for data descriptions coming from an SPSS file and a Stata file (which are also included)
These are the parts of the product intended for public release as the canonical DDI-CDI specification. There are also some supporting materials (such as the Enterprise Architect file), and also the production code used to generate the documentation and syntax representations) but these are not part of the release and are maintained in a separate repository.
The Technical Committe is also providing additional documents to assist you in your review.
