[DDI-users] DDI Directions, August 2013

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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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