[DDI-users] greeting mail

Zsadányi Nagy Csaba zsadanyi at tarki.hu
Sun Jan 11 17:37:53 EST 2004


Hello to all list members,

Let me introduce myself. I'm one of the employees of TÁRKI Databank from 
Hungary who is responsible for developing our archiving (method, structure), 
for maintaining our databases and websites.

TÁRKI has one of the oldest data archives in Eastern Europe. We are a 
member institution of ICPSR. Unfortunately we are a very small databank with 
low budget. It is only now that we have an opportunity to apply DDI 
specification in our archiving system as widely as we could.

After studying DDI specification itself I have realized that moving towards 
DDI would be more complicated than we thought. the specification is very 
abstract, and because of lack of standardization of our current data archive 
we have to face several problems. Moreover, it is also a problem that some 
of the IT solutions we prefer are not automatically compatible with DDI. for 
example we store our databases in MySQL that we manage via an ODBC frontend, 
Perl CGI (using DBD DBI Apache modul). Our first goal is that our fields are 
completely DDI-compatible but we want not to use xml files at all. At the 
same time we would like to have the possibility of generating xml data 
descriptions from SQL by using CGI scripts. (It would be useful if our data 
were included in international cooperation of databanks such as EDAN 
[http://www.gesis.org/en/cooperation/data_service/eastern_europe/].)

Therefore, I would like to ask you to direct me to anyone who could help us 
in this transition with answering our annoying questions about some 
problematic DDI elements ;-).

i look forward to any help or suggestions, 

-- 

Csaba Zsadányi-Nagy
TÁRKI Databank, databank assistant

TÁRKI Social Research Center Social Science Databank
H-1112 Budapest, Budaörsi út 45.
tel: (+36-1) 309-7693, fax: (+36-1) 309-7666
web: http://www.tarki.hu/adatbank-h/
mail: zsadanyi at tarki.hu




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