DDI Newsletter - Q3 September 2016
Deadlines - this volume delayed to Sept. 2016
Content | July 8th |
Editing | July 13th |
Publish | July 14th |
To Be Distributed in PDF and html formats.
Newsletter Content
From the Director
In this issue of DDI Directions, in addition to reporting on conferences and meetings, we highlight the contributions of DDI members engaged in working groups or committees. The vast majority of Alliance progress would not be possible without their efforts. If you see a group or committee to which you would like to contribute, please feel free to reach out to the chair (listed on the web site), or directly to me.
Also in this issue, we have a new column, "Read-Write-Execute (RWX)", written by Knut Wenzig (DIW Berlin), that will highlight both existing and new DDI and metadata-related publications produced by the DDI Community. Special thanks to Knut for writing this column. And special thanks to Kelly Chatain for compiling and editing these newsletters. Starting in 2017, the DDI Newsletter will begin publishing quarterly instead of three times a year.
Jared Lyle
Director, DDI Alliance
lyle@umich.edu
NADDI 2016 Report
With 75 registered participants representing 34 organizations, many of whom were new to the DDI community, the 4th Annual North American DDI Conference was held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada April 7-8. The Health Research Data Repository hosted the event, supported by the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta.
The conference program of 15 presentations and 4 workshops reflected a wide variety of potential and practical uses of DDI within the social science community and beyond, such as helping to drive a new health data ecosystem, managing heterogeneous longitudinal weather data, and addressing the needs of geospatial data and time-based media. Keynote addresses were given by Dr. Lawrence Richer, Associate Director of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute, and Dr. Larry Hoyle ("The Evolution of DDI - Concepts and Technology"), Senior Scientist at the University of Kansas Institute for Policy & Social Research. In addition to the program, Colectica and Nooro Online Research partnered to provide a demonstration of DDI’s interoperability by creating, distributing, and documenting the conference’s feedback survey in real-time.
NADDI 2017 will be held at Ithaca, New York on April 5-7, 2016.
Annual Meetings Held in Bergen, Norway
The DDI Alliance Annual Meeting of Member Representatives and the Meeting of the Scientific Board were held on May 30 in Bergen, Norway, in advance of the IASSIST 2016 conference. The Annual Meeting of Member Representatives included a State of the Alliance presentation by Steve McEachern's (Chair of the Executive Board); the Meeting of the Scientific Board included an activity report by the Technical Committee Both meetings were well attended and productive.
New Members!
The DDI Alliance recently welcomed the Consortium of Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) as a Full Member. Hossein Abroshan, Chief Technical Officer, is the Member Representative.
The Alliance also recently welcomed mStats DS – Data Science and Statistical Software (Marcel Hebing, representative) and the University of Wisconsin Institute on Aging – MIDUS study (Barry Radler, representative) as Associate Members.
New Member Representatives
Ben Abrahamse has replaced Katherine McNeill as the member representative for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Tayyeb Akram has replaced Simon Saint-Georges as the member representative for Epidemiology France, Aviesan - ITMO SantPublique. Welcome, Ben and Tayyeb, and thank you for your service, Kate and Simon!
New Premium Membership option
Members now have the option to become premium members. Premium membership provides all the rights and obligations described in the Bylaws, with additional marketing and visibility benefits. Premium Members are featured on the DDI Alliance website and are authorized to use a “DDI Alliance Premium Member ” logo on their own website. It is expected that Premium members would include software vendors providing products or services based on DDI, large users or implementers of DDI, serious stakeholders in the mission of the DDI Alliance, and any organization that finds value in having its contributions and commitment to DDI publicly recognized.
Updates from Working Groups and Committees
Marketing and Partnerships Group
The goals of the DDI Marketing and Partnerships group are to increase adoption and use of DDI, to grow the DDI Alliance membership, and to coordinate DDI branding and messaging. The Executive Board has identified attendance at professional conferences as an important vehicle for accomplishing these aims, and the Marketing and Partnerships group has been developing marketing materials, displays, and procedures to maximize impact at these conferences. This past spring the Marketing and Partnerships group represented the DDI Alliance at the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference in Austin, Texas, where we shared a booth with ICPSR, distributed marketing materials, sponsored a reception, and had a number of DDI presentations and posters on the AAPOR program.
In the coming months, we will be conducting followups with contacts made at the AAPOR conference, and attending and sponsoring the Conference on Survey Methods in Multinational, Multiregional, and Multicultural Contexts (3MC) in Chicago. We are also coordinating a presence at the International Blaise Users Conference in The Hague in October.
A primary vehicle for promoting and marketing DDI is the DDI Alliance website. A new DDI logo and website design was unveiled in 2015, and the Marketing and Partnerships group will continue working with the Web group during the next three months to modify and improve the website, guided by formal feedback gathered via a session at the NADDI 2016 conference as well as informal and ad hoc suggestions from the DDI community. The Marketing and Partnerships group will also be coordinating with the Training group to create DDI introduction/tutorial to serve as a video on the website and/or as a rolling presentation displayed at our conference booth.
Training Group
The purpose of the Training Group is to improve people's comfort level and competence in working with DDI, bring in new users (and members), gear training to specific audiences, and develop expertise within the community for training purposes. Training Group priorities for the next quarter include updating the web site and creating interactive, introductory multimedia for our online users.
Technical Committee
The Technical Committee has had a busy summer. We are preparing a number of products for review. This includes packaging, documenting, preparing announcements, setting up the pages and issues trackers for each product and then responding to the comments received during the review. Each of the next few months is focused on getting a different product out for review:
June – RDF Vocabularies: DISCO and XKOS
July – Q2 2016 DDI4 Development Review
August – DDI-Lifecycle 3.3 followed but updated high level documentation for DDI-Lifecycle 3.2
September – Special development release of the Codebook Functional View of DDI4
Moving Forward
DDI Moving Forward is an ongoing project to develop the next version of DDI (4). DDI is transitioning to a model-driven specification to support new content and domains, to provide needed flexibility in rendering and packaging, and to ensure a sustainable development process for DDI going forward. The model will enable use-case driven "functional views" of the full model so that prospective DDI users can receive only the subset of DDI classes they need for a specific task or function (e.g., create a simple codebook). The transition also includes moving to a fully automated production framework to create the specification, bindings, and documentation. More information about the DDI work products and how they all fit together is here: http://www.ddialliance.org/work-products-of-ddi-alliance.
The DDI Alliance welcomes members of the DDI community to contribute to Moving Forward efforts, but also emphasizes that DDI 4 is still in development. In the meantime, the DDI Alliance encourages the use of its existing and fully functioning DDI 2 (Codebook) and DDI 3 (Lifecycle) versions.
Moving Forward Sprints
The Moving Forward project hosted development sprints in April and May. The first sprint, held in Edmonton, Canada at the same time as the North American DDI conference, focused on completing a consistency review of the DDI 4 modeling, particularly reviewing consistent use of patterns and documentation content. The second sprint, held in Norway prior to IASSIST 2016, focused on finalizing, documenting, and testing the Codebook Functional View.
The next Moving Forward sprints are planned for October at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Germany. The first week will bring together representatives from other metadata standards to review the current DDI work and discuss how best to work collaboratively. The second week will extend and build upon the progress made during the past three years of development, focusing on four main areas of work: creating re-usable multi-purpose documentation; controlled vocabularies; complex data capture and description; and funding proposals.
Read more about the sprints on the DDI Collaboration Wiki.
News of the Executive Board
Bill Block selected as Vice Chair of Executive Board
Bill Block was selected by the Executive Board in April to serve as Vice Chair. In addition to serving as Vice Chair, Bill will lead Annual Meetings of the Membership Representatives in the absence of the Chair of the Executive Board.
Margaret Levenstein joins the Executive Board
ICPSR's new director, Dr. Margaret Levenstein, joined the Executive Board in June. Maggie has extensive experience working with and stewarding data, including serving as the executive director of the Michigan Census Research Data Center (MCRDC), a joint project with the U.S. Census Bureau. We are excited to welcome Maggie to the Executive Board.
George Alter leaving Executive Board
We thank George Alter, ICPSR's former director, for his service on the Executive Board. George has been a long-time champion of high quality metadata, especially DDI metadata. While George plans to remain active in the DDI community, we'll miss his many contributions to the Board.
Scientific Board Election Results
In May, elections were held for the positions of Chair and Vice-Chair of the Scientific Board. Achim Wackerow (GESIS) was elected as Chair, with Michelle Edwards (CISER) elected as Vice-Chair. The Scientific Board: 1. Contributes to the substantive content of DDI standards and semantic products and approve major version revisions. 2. Evaluates technical proposals through the Alliance standards review process. 3. Undertakes research and testing concerning proposals for DDI standards and semantic products. 4. Develops and promulgates best practices for use of DDI standards and semantic products. 5. Assesses progress and barriers to progress. 6. Suggests future directions and activities for the Alliance. The Technical Committee is a standing committee of the Scientific Board. The Scientific Board also has direct oversight of the Moving Forward project (DDI4).