DDI-CDI Candidate Release

Owned by Simon Hodson
Sept 26, 2023
4 min read

To the DDI Technical Committee/Wendy/Jon:

This message is to notify you that the draft of the DDI Cross-Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) 1.0 specification is now ready for you to review. Having been through one round of public review, we ask that this draft be put to the DDI membership for approval as a published specification. Although considerable work has gone into better documenting and addressing issues raised in the public review, the specification itself does not contain any additional features or support for additional business functionality. Because of this, we feel that there is not a need for another round of public review before the membership is asked to vote.

The materials to be included in the review are all in the DDI-CDI repository: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/

We have assigned the tag "v1.0-rc1".

A downloadable ZIP is available at: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/get/9f0abbcd4eff0e4afb5b94b519f1e5f7d1f2770b.zip

The repository includes both source and build directories - the public release package would not include the source, but the repository is (of course) public. The list below describes what will need to be in the release itself, along with a couple of other useful links. We understand the need for consistency across products, and have attempted to align with the latest DDI Lifecycle release on such matters as licensing and "readme" information - we are happy to adjust this as needed.

Here is the list of product components:

1. High-Level Documentation

PDF version: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/src/master/build/high-level-documentation/DDI-CDI_Model_Specification.pdf (Word version is in the source directory).

2. XMI Model

Including several versions for different purposes:

3. XML Schema

The XMl Schema and associated files can be found in: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/src/master/build/encoding/xml-schema/

Note that we have two example XML files (one for a data description, one for a process description) and also a supporting file (an SPSS .SAV file from which one of the XML examples was programmatically derived). As per the note below, these have some last-minute errors we wanted to fix, and so will be updated next week: https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/src/master/source/example/xml/

We have also included the Oxygen documentation for the XML Schema, as a sub-folder in the XML Schema build. This can also be seen online in browser view at: https://ddi-alliance.bitbucket.io/DDI-CDI/DDI-CDI_v1.0-rc1/encoding/xml-schema/field-level-documentation/oxygen/ddi-cdi.html

4. OWL/RDF

We have produced two RDF syntax representations, one in JSON-LD (https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/src/master/build/encoding/json-ld/) and one in TURTLE (https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/src/master/build/encoding/ontology/). In each case, the last-listed file in the directory combines all of the fragmentary ones above it.

5. Field-Level Documentation

The source is available in the repository (https://bitbucket.org/ddi-alliance/ddi-cdi/src/master/build/field-level-documentation/) and also in a browser view at:

https://ddi-alliance.bitbucket.io/DDI-CDI/DDI-CDI_v1.0-rc1/field-level-documentation/

The field-level documentation links to the different syntax representations and to the XMI, and so provides an integrated view of the model as a reference for implementers.

6. README

README is a restructured text file in the repository DDI-CDI root directory.

7. License information

License informationis found in the LICENSE.txt file and the legal text as distributed by Creative Commons, also in the root directory.

8. Credits

Credits are found in the CREDITS.md file as markdown, accompanied by a more detailed spreadsheet with the information about all the various contributors to the DDI model, not restricted to the members of the current WG (this is referenced friom the CREDITS.md file). These are also in the DDI-CDI root directory in teh repository.

Notes:

(1) We will be looking at providing full documentation of example use cases as a priority after the specification is complete, and these will align with the XML samples to be distributed with the release. We are finalizing the XML examples now, but they should be ready in the coming week. We did not feel it was necessary to hold up the transmission of materials for them, but we will send as soon as they are ready.

(2) The UML subset ("UCMIS") was originally going to be released as part of DDI-CDI, but reviewers felt that it was a useful stand-alone supporting product. We will be discussing how best to release this in the near future, but it is not needed for implementation of DDI-CDI itself, so we decided to handle it separately.

(3) We have been working on documenting the process and production tools, and are aware of the need to archive these along with what is in the current repository, This material is in good shape, but we wanted to separate the release of the specification from the matters related to the production tooling. We are happy to discuss how best to handle this with TC, to keep it consistent with the overall product suite.

(4) The high-level documentation requires a title page, but we were not sure how best to do this. We would appreciate your guidance on this matter, but we are aware that this is something we need to address. This is related to the issues of branding and consistency across the DDI work products, so we thought it was better discussed with TC rather than just within the DDI-CDI WG. (We have included licensing information, but not other parts of title and copyright pages, etc. which would make reference to the Alliance.)

(5) We have established an area in Jira which can be used for tracking issues on this release. We are happy to review that with you to make sure it works the way it should, but we think this will not be problematic - it is very much consistent with other Jira trackers.

Please let us know what we can do to help with the review and voting process. We are happy to do a webinar and/or otherwise provide information to the DDI membership to help inform the approval process, and would be happy to have any advice or input from you regarding these activities.

Kind regards,

Arofan Gregory, Chair, DDI-CDI Working Group