DDI Newsletter - Q4 December 2016

Director's Note

We wish all in the DDI community Happy Holidays and a joyful New Year!

Jared Lyle

Director, DDI Alliance

European DDI Users Conference on Dec. 6-7. 2016

The 8th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI), jointly organized by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC fo IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor, will be held in Cologne, Germany, Dec. 6-7, 2016.

The conference will provide presentations on a wide range of topics relating to DDI:

Case studies
Mature implementations
Early implementations
Interplay of DDI with other standards or technologies
Projects in early phases in which DDI is under consideration
Critiques of DDI

Registration is still open! For more information, please see the EDDI16 conference page: http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi16

Dagstuhl Workshops

Two weeks of DDI metadata workshops were held in October at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics.

The first week was devoted to collaboration and insuring interoperability between DDI and other metadata standards. Representatives came from several metadata standards, as well as from national data repositories and statistical agencies.

The second week brought together twenty-five members of the DDI community to review the next version under development, DDI 4, a model-based specification that will enable documentation of a broader spectrum of data. Week two also focused on controlled vocabularies and developing a plan for supporting long-term metadata infrastructure.

Celebrating 10 Years of DDI Workshops at Dagstuhl

This year marked the 10th anniversary of DDI workshops held at Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics, an internationally renowned informatics center in Wadern, Germany. Participants at the second week workshop (described above) celebrated the occasion with drinks and a presentation by Joachim Wackerow highlighting past workshop topics, accomplishments, and attendees.

Dagstuhl provides a unique forum for DDI training and expert workshops, supporting the process of building a community of qualified DDI users and specification developers. Joachim Wackerow envisioned and initiated the Dagstuhl DDI workshops, and several DDI community members have organized workshops, including Michelle Edwards, Arofan Gregory, Steve McEachern, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan, and Joachim Wackerow.

Special thanks to Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics for past and continued support of DDI Alliance workshops.

New Members

Blaise logo payoff rgb

The DDI Alliance welcomes Blaise - Statistics Netherlands as a Full Member! Harry J.A. Wijnhoven, Deputy CIO of Statistics Netherlands/CBS and CEO Blaise, is the Member Representative and Lon Hofman is the Scientific Representative.

DDI at the 17th International Blaise Users Conference

Blaise is a powerful and flexible software package developed by Statistics Netherlands (CBS), and used for data collection and scientific research worldwide. The International Blaise Users Conference (IBUC) is a conference for users of Blaise software which takes place roughly every 18 months. The conference is mainly targeted at developers, system staff, survey methodologists, survey operations personnel and their managers.

This year at IBUC, Dan Smith and Jeremy Iverson of Colectica presented their new tools, the Blaise Colectica Visual Survey Designer and the Blaise Colectica DDI Connector, both developed in partnership with CBS.

DDI also had a marketing presence at the conference. For more information on Blaise, see http://www.blaise.com/products/general-information.

DDI Scientific Board Chair presented at Sixth Session of OIC Statistical Commission

Joachim Wackerow, Chair of the DDI Scientific Board, presented at the Sixth Session of the Statistical Commission of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC-StatCom), which was held 5-6 November 2016 in Konya, Turkey. Wackerow's presentation was titled "DDI and Its Role on Modernizing Official Statistics."

Review of DDI 4 Q2 Development Draft In Progress

The DDI Technical Committee opened the comment period for the Q2 2016 Development Draft of DDI 4 in October 2016. Comments will be accepted through December 31st. Information on the review process is available from the DDI4 - Comment and Review page, which contains a link to comment instructions and to the release package itself (see the box labeled Current Review in the middle of the page). This release is one of several iterative releases, each of which builds on previous releases. The Q2 Draft includes the class descriptions and diagrams for several of the basic parts of the model, XML Bindings, and high level documentation. We are currently working out issues with the RDF/OWL implementation. The Technical Committee is eager to obtain feedback from the DDI community and they look forward to hearing from you!

Background: 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 available.