[DDI-users] DDI Directions, August 2013
wfornoff at umich.edu
wfornoff at umich.edu
Tue Aug 6 13:53:24 EDT 2013
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Welcome to the new email version of DDI Directions! This format is easier
to navigate and to produce and also has a rendering in PDF (see the link at
the top of the email). Let us know what you think about this type of
presentation.
This issue pulls together summaries of recent DDI events as well as
information about future plans, workshops, and meetings. As always, the DDI
community is active and engaged in moving the standard forward.
Mary Vardigan, Director, DDI Alliance
In This Issue
DDI Alliance Elects First Executive Board
Alliance Welcomes New Members
First "Sprint" for DDI Model to Take Place
DDI Alliance Meets in Cologne
DDI RDF Vocabularies Now Available
DDI Training Offered at Dagstuhl
NADDI 2014 to Take Place in Vancouver
EDDI Releases Call for Papers
Paper on Qualitative Data Published
Colectica Announces Support for REDCap Survey Import and Export Using DDI
Lifecycle Metadata
Nesstar Publisher Now Generates Codebooks
Volume VI, Number 3, August 2013
DDI Alliance Elects First Executive Board
The Alliance is pleased to announce the newly elected members of the
Executive Board, the oversight body that is replacing the former Steering
Committee.
Executive Board members include:
Mari Kleemola, Finnish Social Science Data Service
Steve McEachern, Australian Data Archive
Ron Nakao, Stanford University
Gillian Nicoll, Australian Bureau of Statistics
Anita Rocha, University of Washington, Center for Studies in Demography &
Ecology
Leanne Trimble, University of Toronto Scholars Portal
George Alter, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
(representing ICPSR as the Host Institution)
George Alter
Mari Kleemola
Steve McEachern
Ron Nakao
Gillian Nicoll
Anita Rocha
Leanne Trimble
The Executive Board is charged with setting Alliance policy and budget and
providing strategic advice and guidance.
Alliance Welcomes New Members
The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) in France
has recently joined the DDI Alliance. Benôit Rouppert will serve as the
Member Representative and Guillaume Duffes as the Representative to the
Scientific Board.
We also welcome the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
into membership. The DDI Member Representative will be Josef Schmidhuber
with Fabio Grita as the Scientific Board Representative.
We look forward to working with these new colleagues on DDI activities.
First "Sprint" for DDI Model to Take Place
A workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl in October—DDI Lifecycle Moving Forward
(Part 2)—will progress the work begun last October at Dagstuhl and carried
on through the year. This workshop, structured as a "sprint" to encourage
intensive work with previously defined goals, will provide a venue for
domain experts to interact with technical experts in developing the DDI
information model. A series of subsequent sprints is envisioned as a way to
spur development. Consult this summary for more information on future plans
related to the DDI modeling work.
A recent paper on strategic priorities of the Alliance (PDF) also
highlights this work on the model-based DDI.
DDI Alliance Meets in Cologne
The Annual Meeting of DDI Alliance Members took place in Cologne, Germany,
on May 27 just before the yearly IASSIST meeting. The group discussed the
transition to a new governance structure, building a new model-based DDI
specification, and much more. Minutes of the meeting (PDF) are now
available. DDI Developers also met the same day.
DDI developers relax after the Cologne meeting in May. From left, Sam
Spencer, Arofan Gregory, Johanna Vompras, Oliver Hopt, Marcel Hebing, Olof
Olsson.
DDI RDF Vocabularies Now Available
The Alliance is developing two new RDF vocabularies. Work on these
vocabularies was initiated through Semantic Statistics workshops held at
Schloss Dagstuhl in 2011 and 2012 and organized by GESIS - Leibniz
Institute for the Social Sciences.
The Discovery Vocabulary, or Disco, is designed to support the discovery of
microdata sets and related metadata using RDF technologies in the Web of
Linked Data.
The XKOS Vocabulary, an extended form of the Simple Knowledge Organization
System or SKOS, is intended for managing statistical classifications and
supporting concept management systems.
An open review of the vocabularies will take place in coming months with
the goal of publishing them by the end of the calendar year.
Related to this RDF work and building on the DDI Semantic Statistics
seminars, a first international workshop on Semantic Statistics will be
held on October 21-22 in Sydney with Raphaël Troncy (EURECOM), Franck
Cotton (INSEE), Richard Cyganiak (DERI), Armin Haller (CSIRO), and Alistair
Hamilton (ABS) contributing. This is part of the 12th International
Semantic Web Conference.
In addition, two related papers are now available:
Thomas Bosch, Richard Cyganiak, Arofan Gregory, and Joachim Wackerow, 2013.
DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary: A Metadata Vocabulary for Documenting
Research and Survey Data. In proceedings of the 6th Linked Data on the Web
(LDOW) Workshop at the World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, May 2013.
Dan Gillman, Franck Cotton, and Yves Jaques. "eXtended Knowledge
Organization System (XKOS)." METIS Work Session on Statistical Metadata,
Geneva, Switzerland, May 2013.
DDI Training Offered at Dagstuhl
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences is sponsoring a training
workshop on "Facilitating Process and Metadata-Driven Automation in the
Social, Economic, and Behavioural Sciences with the Data Documentation
Initiative (DDI)," to be held October 21-25, 2013, at Schloss Dagstuhl -
Leibniz Center for Informatics, Wadern, Germany. Instructors are Arofan
Gregory (ODaF - Open Data Foundation); Wendy L. Thomas (Minnesota
Population Center); and Joachim Wackerow (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the
Social Sciences).
This training workshop will provide an introduction to using the DDI
standard to enable many of the processes common to the social, behavioral,
and economic sciences, from the conceptualization of surveys through data
collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination. The focus of the
workshop will be on the "Lifecycle" branch of DDI, version 3.2, which
provides a detailed model of the metadata needed to support both
human-driven and automated processing. The workshop will be organized in a
task-oriented manner, with participants actively documenting real-world use
cases in order to learn how best to employ the DDI model and associated
technology. The use cases produced will be published as the final output of
the workshop, as a resource to the broader DDI community. Participants are
encouraged to bring their own organizational use cases.
Consult the workshop page for more information.
Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz Institute for Informatics, in Wadern, Germany
NADDI 2014 to Take Place in Vancouver
North American DDI User Conference The second annual North American DDI
User Conference will be held at the Harbour Centre in Vancouver, Canada, on
April 1-2, 2014, with workshops taking place the day before on March 31.
Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, and University of
Alberta are co-hosting the event.
The program is currently under development by the Program Committee: Bill
Block, Larry Hoyle, Walter Piovesan (local arrangements liaison), and Mary
Vardigan. If you would like to participate, please email Larry Hoyle. The
Web site for NADDI 2014 will be available soon.
EDDI Releases Call for Papers
European DDI User Conference The 5th Annual European DDI User Conference
(EDDI13) will be hosted by the Réseau Quetelet, French Data Archives for
Social Sciences, in Paris, France, on December 3-4, 2013. Other organizers
include GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and IDSC of IZA
- International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.
The meeting will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over
Europe and the world. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or using
DDI is invited to attend and present.
For the first time, the submission of full papers to the conference is
encouraged. Papers will be published as EDDI13 conference proceedings in
the DDI Working Paper Series. The topics of the conference include, but are
not limited to:
Infrastructure for Data Collection, Research, and Archiving
Reusing and Sharing Metadata
DwB - Data without Boundaries
DASISH - Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities
Official Statistics
Software / Tools
The deadline for submissions is September 22, 2013. For more information
about the conference, see the conference Web site.
Paper on Qualitative Data Published
A new paper on qualitative data (PDF) has been added to the DDI Working
Paper Series. This new paper, "A Qualitative Data Model for DDI," presents
a model developed by several experts in qualitative data to cover important
use cases.
Colectica Announces Support for REDCap Survey Import and Export Using DDI
Lifecycle Metadata
Colectica has announced that its Colectica Designer metadata software now
supports interoperability with the REDCap system for online surveys. The
Colectica Designer software allows for two-way interoperability between the
REDCap data dictionary format and the DDI 3 Lifecycle standard on which
Colectica is based.
"We are happy to add REDCap import and export to Colectica Designer's
survey specification and creation feature," said Dan Smith, a partner at
Colectica. "Generating a REDCap data dictionary from a standards-based
repository allows for greater accuracy and transparency of the resulting
data."
The REDCap data dictionary import and export is now available in the
current Colectica 4.2 beta. Current customers and evaluators are free to
download it from the Colectica Web site to try out the additional REDCap
interoperability feature.
Nesstar Publisher Now Generates Codebooks
The new Nesstar Publisher version 4.0.9
(http://www.nesstar.com/software/download.html) comes with beta support for
PDF generation. When a study is open in Publisher, a Generate PDF-entry is
available from the Documentation menu.
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