[DDI-users] Fwd: [DDI-Qual] DDI Directions Newsletter, November 2013
Mary Vardigan
vardigan at umich.edu
Sat Nov 9 08:32:10 EST 2013
Apologies for the out-of-date issue sent earlier...
Mary
Having trouble viewing this message? Links disabled? Click or copy:
http://www.ddialliance.org/system/files/ddi-directions-2013-11.pdf
*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 <vardigan at umich.edu>*
*In This Issue*
- EDDI Registration Open <#142393981681b41d_a01>
- Call for Papers for NADDI 2014 Announced <#142393981681b41d_a02>
- First DDI Sprint Held <#142393981681b41d_a03>
- Use Case Based DDI Training Held <#142393981681b41d_a04>
- Generating a DDI Codebook from SDMX <#142393981681b41d_a05>
- Colectica Updates <#142393981681b41d_a06>
- DDI Hackathon <#142393981681b41d_a07>
- DDI Workshop in Budapest - What's New in DDI 3.2?<#142393981681b41d_a08>
- New Release of Canard Question Module Editor <#142393981681b41d_a09>
- DDI Annual Report Available <#142393981681b41d_a10>
Volume VII, Number 1, November 2013
EDDI Registration Open
EDDI13 <http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/EDDI13/index>,
the 5th Annual European DDI User Conference, will take place on December
3-4, 2013, in Paris, hosted by Réseau
Quetelet<http://www.reseau-quetelet.cnrs.fr/spip/?lang=en>,
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<http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/EDDI13/schedConf/program>and
program are available.
Registration<http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/EDDI13/about/registration>for
participants and accommodation
booking<http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/EDDI13/schedConf/accommodation#Accommodation>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 <http://www.insee.fr/en/default.asp>, 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<http://www.rdl.sfu.ca/NADDI/>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<http://kuclas.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eL65dbw9G9hMN3T>.
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 <http://www.rdl.sfu.ca/NADDI/>.
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<http://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/evhp/?semnr=13442>was
preceded by a 2012
workshop <http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/evhp/?semnr=12432>that
produced a paper on the modeling process.
You can read more about the sprint
here<http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi-moving-forward-process>.
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<http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/evhp/?semnr=13432>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<http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index.html>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 <http://sdmx.org/>.
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
<http://www.oecd.org/std/SDMX%202013%20Session%203.7%20-%20A%20statistical%20metadata%20system%20based%20on%20SDMX.pdf>
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<http://www.colectica.com/software/colecticaforexcel/>.
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 <http://www.colectica.com/changelog/> and see the detailed Press
Release <http://www.prweb.com/releases/Colectica/Metadata/prweb11287707.htm>
.
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 <http://www.colectica.com/training/ddi> 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:
1. Learn what's changed in DDI 3.2 over the past year
2. Get in-depth with DDI content
3. 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 (e.g.,
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<http://jeremy.blogs.colectica.com/ddi-workshop-in-budapest/>
New Release of Canard Question Module Editor
Sam Spencer has announced a new release of the Canard Question Module
Editor<http://bit.ly/canard_v02>
.
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<http://bit.ly/14wO21u>
.
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<http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/DDI-Lifecycle/3.1/>import
and export
You can download the windows executable here <http://bit.ly/canard_v02>.
A Mac OSX application should be coming very shortly.
DDI Annual Report Available
The DDI Alliance recently released its Annual Report for
2012-2013<http://www.ddialliance.org/sites/default/files/DDIAnnualReport2013.pdf>
.
<http://www.ddialliance.org/sites/default/files/DDIAnnualReport2013.pdf>
_______________________________________________
DDI-qual mailing list
DDI-qual at icpsr.umich.edu
http://lists.icpsr.umich.edu/mailman/listinfo/ddi-qual
--
Mary Vardigan
Assistant Director, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social
Research (ICPSR)
P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
Phone: 734-615-7908
Fax: 734-647-8200
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