SDTL Working Group 17 December 2020

Owned by George Charles Alter
Last updated: Jan 27, 2021
2 min read

  1. Announcements

    1. Publication of SDTL “product page” by DDI Alliance

      1. SDTL has been promoted to a “product” on the DDI Alliance website: https://ddialliance.org/products/sdtl/1.0

      2. All of the changes that we have approved are in version 1.0. All future changes must go through the DDI Alliance procedures. Changes in documentation that do not change the schemas can be made, but they will not be official until the next full review.

    2. SDTL introduction in IASSIST Quarterly

      1. IASSIST Quarterly has published an article about SDTL

      2. Alter, G., Donakowski, D., Gager, J., Heus, P., Hunter, C., Ionescu, S., . . . Voldsater, O. (2020). Provenance Metadata for Statistical Data: An Introduction to Structured Data Transformation Language (SDTL). ICPSR. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor MI. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/156015

    3. Presentation at CODATA/GO FAIR Convergence Symposium

      1. Our SDTL presentation at the Symposium resulted in a contact with Yvan Le Bras at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He is heading a database on biodiversity that uses Ecological Metadata Language. Yvan was enthusiastic about the possibilities for using SDTL, and he will have his team work on it.

    4. SDTL/ProvONE RDF progress

      1. Thomas has been working on integrating SDTL with the ProvONE model using RDF, which will make it accessible using semantic web tools. Tim McPhillips, a colleague on the Whole Tale Project, has proposed a new way to query SDTL in the context of ProvONE. Tim has been successful writing SPARQL queries that pick useful information from the SDTL RDF, like tracing the data flow among SDTL commands. This is an important step forward for integrating SDTL into the PROV world. Thomas has been writing a program that converts SDTL JSON into SDTL RDF. The next step is to use the overlap between SDTL and ProvONE to use ProvONE concepts to query SDTL.

    5. SDTL extension project proposal

      1. George, Dara, and Jim have been working on a grant proposal for an extension of SDTL to describe analysis procedures that create data, like predicted values from regression models. The proposal will be submitted for coordinated funding between NSF in the US and research councils in the UK. An important feature of the proposal is a partnership with the STATO ontology of statistics at the Oxford E-research Center. They hope to submit the proposal in late January.