[DDI-users] DDI Directions Volume VII, Number 2, February 2014

[mcianna at umich.edu]

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 From the Director

Welcome to a new edition of DDI Directions. In this February issue, we  
focus on recent DDI-related meetings and events as well as new events on  
the horizon -- notably, the second North American DDI Users Conference, to  
be held March 31-April 2 in Vancouver. We also present new DDI tools and  
some useful updates. As always, a lot of activity is taking place - thank  
you to the DDI community for your involvement!

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


In This Issue


NADDI 2014 to Take Place in Vancouver
New Tools for DDI Available
Successful EDDI Held in Paris
DDI Alliance Members to Meet in Toronto
Spotlight on the DDI Controlled Vocabularies Working Group
DDI is Sprinting!
Project Manager Identified for the Modeling Project
DDI Codebook 2.5.1 Published, DDI Lifecycle 3.2 Coming Soon
Identify your Data in the Global Community
New Data Expression and Transformation Language Being Developed
Minutes of Executive Board Online
HLG Standards Meeting Takes Place
New DDI Representative

Volume VII, Number 2, February 2014

NADDI 2014 to Take Place in Vancouver

Please join us in Vancouver for the second North American DDI Users  
Conference, to be held March 31-April 2, 2014. Organized by the University  
of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta  
Libraries, and the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the  
University of Kansas, the meeting will take place at the Harbour Centre,  
Simon Fraser University, with the theme "Documenting Reproducible Research."

The Keynote Speaker for the conference is Ann Green. Ann is an independent  
research consultant focusing on the digital lifecycle of scholarly  
resources, including their creation, delivery, management, long-term  
stewardship, and preservation. She has significant history and experience  
with the DDI, serving on the original DDI committee in 1995 and coauthoring  
the first DDI specification.

NADDI 2014 offers two half-day workshops on March 31 that will be of  
interest to health researchers and others wanting to produce better  
metadata to support their research.


New Tools for DDI Available

At the EDDI meeting in December in Paris, Metadata Technology North America  
(MTNA) launched some new DDI-related tools, described below:

SledgeHammer UI

As part of MTNA's OpenDataForge toolkit of data management tools,  
SledgeHammer is a flexible desktop-based application enabling the  
production and use of open data. Sledgehammer facilitates the  
transformation of data across popular proprietary, text, and database  
formats and supports the extraction and generation of standards-based  
metadata, including all versions of DDI. The interface was designed with  
the diversity of potential data users - from data producers, to archivists,  
librarians, analysts, and the general public - in mind. SledgeHammer is  
available as a freeware Community edition and a low-cost licensed product.

More specifically, Sledgehammer:


Reads data and extracts metadata from: Stata, SPSS, SAS, DDI+ASCII,  
Stat/Transfer+ASCII and SQL databases
Transforms data into open ASCII text format (fixed, csv, delimited), with  
various optimizations
Produces standard metadata from input files -- supported specifications  
include DDI-Codebook (1.0-2.1 and 2.5), DDI LifeCycle (3.1-3.2), and  
Triple-SSS (1.1, 2.0)
Computes summary statistics at the variable and category levels for  
inclusion in DDI or for other purposes -- includes minimum, maximum,  
average, standard deviation, count of missing values, weighted and  
unweighted frequencies
Generates scripts for reading ASCII data into R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, SDA, and  
various flavors of SQL (MS-SQL, MySql, Oracle, Vertica, HSQLDB). The  
database scripts support the creation of database schemas along with bulk  
loading of the ASCII data.

Survey Manager

The Open Metadata Survey Manager is an open source DDI Lifecycle-based tool  
developed by MTNA based on similar tools being implemented for the Canadian  
Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN), NORC at the University of Chicago,  
the US National Science Foundation, and other projects. The OM Survey  
Manager aims to provide researchers and data administrators with a tool to  
familiarize themselves with DDI and survey metadata management. It is  
designed to work with metadata produced by DataForge SledgeHammer.

The OM Survey Manager is a standalone application used to view, edit, and  
enhance survey metadata saved in local or shared repositories using DDI and  
other related standards.

Successful EDDI Held in Paris

The 5th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI13) took place on December  
3 and 4, 2013, in Paris in the impressive Cité Internationale Universitaire  
de Paris. The host of the conference was Réseau Quetelet, the French Data  
Archive for the Social Sciences. EDDI13 was jointly organized by GESIS -  
Leibniz Center for the Social Sciences and the Institute for the Study of  
Labor (IZA) together with the host and was supported by the DDI Alliance.

The Keynote Address was delivered by Philippe Cuneo, Director of  
Methodology, Statistical Coordination and International Relations, at the  
French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), on  
the topic "Why National Statistical Institutes are Increasingly Interested  
in Standards."

The Data without Boundaries project introduced a new CESSDA Portal for  
European Research Data Discovery, and the EU infrastructure project DASISH  
presented a whole session on how structured metadata can support the  
interplay of tools for questionnaire design, questionnaire translation, and  
a database of questions and variables.

The program encompassed three plenary talks, 37 presentations (including  
three full papers) in two concurrent tracks, and nine poster and software  
demonstrations. Over 90 people from 46 organizations in 14 countries and  
two international organizations participated in EDDI13. The presentations  
are available in the detailed program.

Additional events, each with 15 to 20 participants, took place around EDDI:  
there were two half-day tutorials on DDI subjects, a one-day meeting of DDI  
software developers, and a two-day working meeting (a "sprint") on the  
further development of the model-based DDI.

EDDI14 will take place December 2-3, 2014, in London. The host is the  
Institute of Education (University of London), which includes the Centre  
for Longitudinal Studies.

Roxane Silberman, Director of the Réseau Quetelet, introduces EDDI13  
Keynote Speaker Philippe Cuneo.
Roxane Silberman, Director of the Réseau Quetelet, introduces EDDI13  
Keynote Speaker Philippe Cuneo.

DDI Alliance Members to Meet in Toronto

On Monday, June 2, 2014, the DDI Alliance will hold its Annual Meeting of  
Members as well as a meeting of the DDI Scientific Board in advance of the  
IASSIST conference in Toronto. The meeting will take place at the  
University of Toronto Robarts Library. More information about the agenda  
will be coming soon.

Spotlight on the DDI Controlled Vocabularies Working Group
spotlight
A first set of controlled vocabularies to describe specific aspects of  
research data across the data life cycle has been developed for the DDI  
standard by the DDI Controlled Vocabularies Group (CVG). These vocabularies  
may be used for other purposes and by other applications as well. The group  
will continue to add new vocabularies to the site as they are finalized.  
Currently, the CVG is working on vocabularies for Source Type and Data Type.

Select DDI Alliance vocabularies are already in use at organizations like  
the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), GESIS - Leibniz Institute  
for the Social Sciences, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and  
Social Science (ICPSR), Mathematica Policy Research, the UK Data Archive  
(UKDA), and the University at Bielefeld, Germany. Nesstar Publisher now  
incorporates the controlled vocabularies for Analysis Unit and Time Method.

Members of the CVG are:


Lucy Bell, United Kingdom Data Archive (UKDA)
Stefan Ekman, Swedish National Data Service (SND)
Sanda Ionescu, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social  
Research (ICPSR), Chair
Taina Jääskeläinen, Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD)
Meinhard Moschner, GESIS -- Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Michaela Olde, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
Hilde Orten, Norwegian Social Science Data Service (NSD)

DDI is Sprinting!

sprinter A successful "sprint" was held the last week of October at Schloss  
Dagstuhl in Wadern, Germany, followed by a two-day sprint after EDDI in  
Paris. Participants made significant headway in launching the modeling  
process through these sprints.

Two other sprints are planned in upcoming months. Groups will convene the  
week before NADDI in Vancouver (March 24-28) and the week before IASSIST in  
Toronto (May 26-30).

Virtual teams have been established to build on progress from the sprints.

The DDI Alliance has created an email list for individuals interested in  
contributing to and following the progress of the project to create a  
model-based DDI specification. Subscribe to the email list.

Project Manager Identified for the Modeling Project

Thérèse Lalor of the Australian Bureau of Statistics will be coming on  
board as project manager for the DDI Modeling Project, serving from April  
through June 2014. Thérèse managed the successful GSIM project, bringing  
the project to a close efficiently and on time. We look forward to working  
closely with Thérèse in coming months.

DDI Codebook 2.5.1 Published, DDI Lifecycle 3.2 Coming Soon

A new sub-minor version of DDI Codebook - DDI 2.5.1 - was published on  
January 29, 2014. This new iteration does not change the namespace of  
DDI-C. Modifications include the addition of DataFingerprint, relaxed  
cardinality to support multiple languages, and expanded documentation.

DDI Lifecycle 3.2 will be published later in March.

Identify your Data in the Global Community

The DDI agency identifier registry ensures that your organization uses a  
globally unique agency identifier and allows configuration of resolution  
services.

To obtain an agency identifier, first create an account for your  
organization and then request a new agency in the Manage section of the  
website. An administrative and technical contact is required.

The agency identifier should be in the form [country code] dot [name]. For  
example: us.agencyname

Get your identifier today!

New Data Expression and Transformation Language Being Developed

Arofan Gregory, Metadata Technology North America, recently attended a  
three-day meeting hosted by the Bank of Italy to determine requirements for  
the "Expression and Transformation Language" (ETL), which will integrate  
with DDI. The meeting was well-attended, with participants from Australian  
Bureau of Statistics, Agilis, Bank of Italy, Eurostat, ILO, IMF, ISTAT,  
OECD, and UNESCO.

Use cases and DDI requirements were presented. The focus for the initial  
development is validation, with the idea that other types of processes will  
be supported in the future. The "transformation" capability will include  
operations such as recodes and the derivation of variables. The question of  
whether "round-tripability" with stats packages could be supported was  
discussed. This work is to be completed by July 2014.

Minutes of Executive Board Online

The DDI's newly elected Executive Board is very active, meeting every other  
month with full agendas and good discussions. You can find out more about  
what is being discussed by reading the meeting minutes.

HLG Standards Meeting Takes Place

Convened by the UNECE, a new Modernization Committee on Standards comprised  
of representatives of national statistical organizations met in November  
2013 in Geneva with Joachim Wackerow representing the DDI Alliance. The MC  
discussed key issues and priorities for modernization:


Support the further development and implementation of the GSBPM and GSIM -  
this includes more work on links with other standards, particularly DDI and  
SDMX, more detail on GSBPM overarching processes (particularly quality  
management), publishing use-cases and establishing practitioner communities
Define additional DDI profiles to support the use of DDI in different  
aspects of official statistics
Support greater standardization through SDMX data structure definitions,  
cross-domain code-lists, etc., in collaboration with the SDMX Statistical  
Working Group
Support the implementation of the Common Statistical Production  
Architecture (CSPA) from a standards perspective.
Investigate the potential use of semantic web standards in official  
statistics, including in relation to Big Data and Open Data, in  
collaboration with a proposed new W3C group on semantic statistics
Promote the greater visibility and use of standards within statistical  
organizations, including as a prerequisite, to define what we mean by  
standards, and how they should be managed and maintained. This work could  
build on that done by the European Statistical System Sponsorship on  
Standardization, and other relevant European projects
Develop a general glossary of metadata and/or modernization terminology, as  
a complement to the proposed SDMX Glossary
Create a coherent overview of the standards needed for statistical  
modernization. This could include mapping existing standards and tool sets  
to the GSBPM, and outreach to other standards initiatives, eg, XBRL.

New DDI Representative

Bojana Tasic, head of the IT group from the Swiss Foundation for Research  
in Social Sciences (FORS), is the new FORS DDI Member Representative,  
replacing Andreas Perret. Welcome, Bojana!


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