[DDI-users] DDI Directions Newsletter, November 2013

[wfornoff at umich.edu]

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This issue of DDI Directions includes a brief report on recent work related  
to development of the next-generation DDI, which will be based on an  
information model. This is a very exciting project, permitting us to draw  
upon all of the advances that have taken place since DDI Lifecycle was  
first published in 2008: we now have existing vocabularies and innovative  
new technologies that make our work process easier. This is a community  
effort and there are many ways to be involved, so if you are interested,  
please get in touch.

Mary Vardigan, Director, DDI Alliance, vardigan at umich.edu


In This Issue


EDDI Registration Open
Call for Papers for NADDI 2014 Announced
First DDI Sprint Held
Use Case Based DDI Training Held
Generating a DDI Codebook from SDMX
Colectica Updates
DDI Hackathon
DDI Workshop in Budapest - What's New in DDI 3.2?
New Release of Canard Question Module Editor
DDI Annual Report Available

Volume VII, Number 1, November 2013

EDDI Registration Open

EDDI13, the 5th Annual European DDI User Conference, will take place on  
December 3-4, 2013, in Paris, hosted by Réseau Quetelet, the French portal  
for data in the humanities and social sciences. A meeting of DDI software  
developers precedes the EDDI conference on Monday, December 2.

The conference will open on Tuesday, December 3, at 9:00 am and close on  
Wednesday, December 4, at 5:30 pm. Tutorials (included in the conference  
fee) will take place on Monday, December 2, from 2:00 pm - 5:30 pm.

The schedule overview and program are available. Registration for  
participants and accommodation booking are now open. Please note that the  
conference has a maximum number of 90 participants.

The program offers 38 presentations including the keynote from Philippe  
Cuneo (Director of Methodology, Statistical Coordination and International  
Relations at INSEE, the French National Institute for Statistics and  
Economic Studies), 3 full papers (first time this year), 9 posters/software  
demonstrations, and 2 tutorials.


EDDI will take place at the Maison Internationale and the Cambodia House of  
the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.

Call for Papers for NADDI 2014 Announced

The second annual North American DDI User Conference will take place 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-hosts for  
the event. There will be an opening night reception on March 31. NADDI is  
based on the successful European DDI conference (EDDI), now in its fifth  
year.

The NADDI2014 call for papers is now open. To submit a proposal for a  
presentation, please fill out the submission form.

We are looking for presentations related to DDI: the use of DDI in research  
settings, archives, or in official statistics organizations; papers on DDI  
tools, or critiques of DDI. Of particular interest are presentations on the  
use of DDI related to documenting reproducible research.

For details on how to submit a proposal for a presentation, please visit  
the NADDI2014 website.

First DDI Sprint Held

A successful first “sprint” was held from October 28-November 1, at Schloss  
Dagstuhl, Leibniz Center for Informatics, in Wadern, Germany, to jumpstart  
the process of producing a model-based DDI specification. Twenty-two  
participants contributed to the sprint, which focused on creating  
infrastructure for the DDI modeling process, building a production process  
for producing the desired technical expressions from the UML model, and  
creating DDI object descriptions for inclusion in the model-based  
specification. This Dagstuhl workshop was preceded by a 2012 workshop that  
produced a paper on the modeling process.

You can read more about the sprint here. The second sprint is scheduled for  
December 5-6 in Paris after the EDDI conference.


 From left, Ørnulf Risnes, Wendy Thomas, Dan Gillman, Merja Karjalainen,  
Larry Hoyle

Use Case Based DDI Training Held

A new approach to DDI Lifecycle training was implemented at the Dagstuhl  
Training workshop held the week of October 21-25. Participants in the  
course brought DDI use cases that were discussed in the full group, leading  
to greater interaction and exchange of ideas and practical suggestions for  
DDI implementation. Subgroups were created on the basis of the use cases to  
write related papers.


Participants in the DDI Lifecycle training course held in October [Photo  
credit: Stephanie Roth]

Generating a DDI Codebook from SDMX

By Pekto Yanev and Jean-François Fracheboud
Federal Statistical Office, Switzerland

The Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland is in the process of adding  
new functionality to its central Statistical Metadata System (SMS), which  
will generate a DDI Codebook from the metadata stored in the system in SDMX  
format.

In implementing the new features, developers of the SMS, which is based  
entirely on SDMX, were rapidly confronted with the problem of volume: that  
is, how to structure, store, exploit, and present a large (and constantly  
increasing) volume of mutually-dependent metadata. The DDI Codebook  
provides a convenient solution to this problem, considering that an  
interface between the SDMX and DDI is defined in the system. This interface  
has been developed in the form of a “plug-in”, which generates the Codebook  
automatically using the information stored as SDMX artefacts: code lists,  
hierarchical code lists, concept schemes, metadata structure definition  
(MSD), metadata sets, data structure definitions (DSD), and data sets. The  
flexibility of the SDMX standard allowed the use of an MSD for defining the  
structure of the DDI Codebook and the metadata set together with other  
artefacts for describing its content.

The first prototype of the SDMX-generated Codebook was presented during the  
SDMX Global Conference in Paris. It is currently used to produce PDF files  
containing the DDI Document Description and DDI Study Description parts of  
the Codebook together with a catalogue of variables (a synopsis), their  
formats, and associated code lists.

The DDI Codebook can be generated as a structured PDF file or, in the near  
future, in HTML format, ready to be published directly on an organization's  
website. Although the codebook is DDI-conformant, in order to satisfy the  
demands of the statistical production units, the system permits new  
information and attributes to be added dynamically by the user.

Pekto Yanev and Jean-François Fracheboud gave a presentation about their  
statistical metadata system based on SDMX at the SDMX Global Conference  
held September 11-13, 2013, in Paris.


Colectica Updates

The Colectica Team announces a new version of Colectica for Excel. This  
update addresses feedback since the initial release. Colectica for Excel is  
available for free download on the Colectica website.

In addition, Colectica 4.2 has just been released. You can view a summary  
of changes and see the detailed Press Release.

The new 4.2 release builds on previous versions by adding features such as  
support for SDMX-based international quality frameworks, translated user  
interfaces, REDCap and queXML survey import and export, and a new  
customizable task-based user interface mode.

DDI Hackathon

A small group of developers met at the Danish National Archive in  
Copenhagen on October 24-25 for a DDI Hackathon, organized by Jannik  
Vestergaard Jensen (Danish Data Archive) and Olof Olsson (Swedish National  
Data Service). The goal of the Hackathon was to bring people together to  
collaborate on implementations of the mapping for the DDI Discovery  
vocabulary (DISCO) and DDI-C/DDI-L, with these tasks in mind:


Create a DDI-L (and DDI-C) to DDI-RDF stylesheet
Convert existing DDI-L/DDI-C to DDI-RDF
Deploy an SPARQL endpoint
Write SPARQL queries (based on  
http://rdf-vocabulary.ddialliance.org/discovery.html#example-queries )
Write proof of concept applications and widgets based on these queries

DDI Workshop in Budapest - What's New in DDI 3.2?

By Jeremy Iverson

In August Colectica developers Jeremy Iverson and Dan Smith traveled to  
Budapest to provide training on DDI as part of Colectica's new DDI 3.2  
training series. Jeremy wrote an account of the training, which is  
excerpted here.

For the past year or so we've been advising on a German project to develop  
some data documentation tools for folks working with employment data. As  
part of the project, we went to Budapest to conduct training on DDI. We  
worked with the developers at OPIT, who are creating a toolset called  
Rogatus that works with the DDI Lifecycle standard. Last year we provided  
an introductory workshop to the same developers, so this year we were able  
to dive deeper.

We had a few goals for the workshop:


Learn what's changed in DDI 3.2 over the past year
Get in-depth with DDI content
Since Colectica works with the same standard, make sure Colectica and  
Rogatus are interoperable

Bonus: Besides accomplishing these, a side effect of having four developers  
spend a full week with our eyes on the DDI 3.2 schemas is that we ended up  
performing a pretty thorough initial review of the draft standard. We were  
able to submit dozens of fix requests to the DDI Technical Committee, and  
I'm thrilled that the fixes have been incorporated into the schema.

Changes in DDI 3.2 over the past year

The OPIT team is targeting the upcoming DDI version 3.2 instead of the  
current 3.1 release. They knew going in that 3.2 was a moving target, but  
the improved developer-friendliness of the update makes it worthwhile.  
Since the schemas the developers were targeting were a year old, the first  
day of the workshop was focused on bringing everybody up to speed on the  
freshly-released draft 3.2 schemas. Briefly, what changed over the past  
year includes:


All item types can now be referenced; there are no places where items must  
be included inline
All types now have consistently-structured Groups (eg, VariableGroup,  
QuestionGroup, ConceptGroup)
Documenting datasets is much easier
Specifying data types for questions and variables no longer requires an  
extra level of indirection with “delineations”. What were those anyway?
Describing missing values is simplified
A few of the new elements were renamed, like DataElement ->  
RepresentedVariable

Read more about the Budapest visit


New Release of Canard Question Module Editor

Sam Spencer has announced a new release of the Canard Question Module  
Editor.

The biggest addition to this release is the ability to import and export  
DDI-Lifecycle 3.1 documents. Sam points out that this is due in no small  
part to the expertise of Olof Olsson, whose knowledge of XSLT were  
invaluable in producing the DDI<->SQBL conversion.

This addition provides the ability to quickly and easily generate  
questionnaires in real-time with live questionnaire preview that can then  
be converted to and stored as DDI.

This functionality can be seen in the tutorial videos online.

This playlist includes videos demonstrating how to create basic questions,  
questions with complex responses, simple logical flow, and dynamic text  
with word substitutions, all in an easy to use, click-and-drag,  
what-you-see-is-what-you-mean user interface.

Currently functional in this release:


Dynamic text and word substitutions in question text and statements
Nested branching and complex routing within surveys
Three types of basic response type:

Text - with optional enforcement of minimum and maximum response length
Number - with optional enforcement of minimum and maximum values, with  
required step values
Codelists - with the ability to indicate a minimum and maximum number of  
choices

While also allowing for complex response types:

Question Groups - allow for tightly linked questions with different  
responses to be brought together
Individual questions can have subquestions and multiple responses to  
capture complex lists and grids of responses quickly

Live preview of question routing and example form instances using Graphviz  
and XForms
Plugin support to extend import and export functionality

This release includes plugins for DDI3.1 import and export


You can download the windows executable here.

A Mac OSX application should be coming very shortly.

DDI Annual Report Available

The DDI Alliance recently released its Annual Report for 2012-2013.



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