[DDI-users] DDI Directions Volume VIII, Number 1, October 2014

[mcianna at umich.edu]

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 From the Director

As an increasing number of groups and conferences focus on research data,  
we are hearing more about the importance of metadata. The DDI community  
understands how critical metadata are to intelligent data use. This issue  
of DDI Directions showcases a variety of activities taking place to advance  
the cause of DDI with the goal of promoting good metadata practice.

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


In This Issue


Meet the Scientific Board Chair
Controlled Vocabularies Group Releases New Content
New DDI Collaboration Tools in Progress
EDDI to Take Place in London in December
International Colectica Users Conference (ICUC) to Follow EDDI
Wellcome Trust Report on Data Discoverability Highlights DDI
DDI Training to Be Held at Dagstuhl
New DDI Trainer Selected
DDI Moving Forward Advisory Group Begins to Meet
Upcoming Sprints Announced
NADDI Conference Dates Announced
Two New DDI Groups Forming
Open Data Packaging

Volume VIII, Number 1, October 2014

Meet the Scientific Board Chair
Adam Brown
Adam Brown is the new Chair of the DDI Alliance Scientific Board. Adam's  
day job is Manager of Information Management at Statistics New Zealand,  
where he manages a team responsible for providing library services,  
document and data management advice, and metadata tools and standards. Adam  
has held several roles in the eight years he has been at Statistics New  
Zealand but most recently has led the design and implementation of a new  
suite of metadata infrastructure systems. Adam is also involved in the  
international statistical community, being a key contributor to the  
development of the Generic Statistical Information Model (GSIM) and a  
member of the UNECE Modernisation Committee on Standards. In his roles Adam  
has been an evangelist for DDI and other metadata standards and has a good  
technical understanding of DDI Codebook and Lifecycle. Adam hopes to bring  
some clarity to the activities the Scientific Board is undertaking and  
ensure that DDI 4 is targeted to meet user needs across the entire  
community. Outside of his professional life Adam is proud father of a  
two-year-old and is a keen handyman around the house.

Controlled Vocabularies Group Releases New Content

The DDI Controlled Vocabularies Group (CVG) has recently published five new  
vocabularies and translations of existing ones. New vocabularies are now in  
place to cover Aggregation Method, Data Type, Date Type, Numeric Type, and  
Time Zone, as well as new versions of Mode of Collection (v 1.1) and  
Summary Statistic Type (V. 2.0). German and Finnish translations of  
AnalysisUnit and TimeMethod are also available.

New DDI Collaboration Tools in Progress
Atlassian Logo
The DDI Alliance has adopted the Atlassian suite of OnDemand products,  
which includes Jira for issue tracking, Confluence for collaboration and  
sharing, and Bitbucket for hosting code (Bitbucket uses Git as a revision  
control system). More information on working with these tools will be  
available soon.

EDDI to Take Place in London in December

The 6th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI14) will be held on  
December 2-3, 2014, at the IOE - Institute of Education, University of  
London.

Organized jointly by the IOE - Institute of Education, University of  
London; GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences; and IDSC of IZA  
- International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of  
Labor, EDDI 2014 offers 30 presentations as well as tutorials and  
co-located events. The keynote speech will be delivered by Peter Knight  
(Deputy Director, Head of Research Information and Intelligence, in the  
Department of Health's Research and Development Directorate, United Kingdom  
government).

The detailed draft program including abstracts is now available, and  
registration for participants and accommodation booking are open. The  
deadline for the early bird registration fee is November 2, 2014. The  
reduced rates of the hotels are available on a first-come, first-served  
basis. For questions or any other correspondence regarding EDDI14, please  
send an email to eddi14 at googlegroups.com.
Institute of Education, University of London
Institute of Education, University of London

International Colectica Users Conference (ICUC) to Follow EDDI
Colectica Logo
Co-located with the EDDI meeting in London, the International Colectica  
Users Conference (ICUC) will take place on December 4. The focus of the  
conference is practical approaches to DDI metadata management, innovative  
research, successful implementations and lessons learned, and Colectica  
extensions and tools developed by and for the community.

Both conferences are hosted by the Institute for Education, University of  
London. Registration for the events is separate, and you can attend either  
or both.

Wellcome Trust Report on Data Discoverability Highlights DDI

In July 2014 the Wellcome Trust issued a report summarizing findings  
related to the current discoverability of public health and epidemiology  
data sets and barriers to access. Several recommendations in the report  
relate to the use of DDI.

DDI Training to Be Held at Dagstuhl

A DDI training workshop on "Facilitating Process and Metadata-Driven  
Automation in the Social, Economic, and Behavioural Sciences with the Data  
Documentation Initiative (DDI)" will be held October 13-17, 2014, at  
Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics, Wadern, Germany. Course  
instructors are Arofan Gregory (ODaF - Open Data Foundation, Tucson,  
Arizona, USA); Wendy L. Thomas (MPC - Minnesota Population Center,  
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA); and Joachim Wackerow (GESIS - Leibniz  
Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany).

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 can 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.
Schloss Dagstuhl
Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz Center for Informatics, in Wadern, Germany

New DDI Trainer Selected

The Alliance is pleased to announce that Jon Johnson, University of London,  
International Education Office, has been selected as the new DDI trainer.  
Jon brings to the position a wealth of experience in managing and  
documenting longitudinal data as well as an extensive network of audiences  
for DDI training.

Jon will spend a week in Mannheim in October with the other Dagstuhl  
trainers -- Arofan Gregory, Wendy Thomas, and Joachim Wackerow -- and will  
then participate in the training workshop at Dagstuhl the following week  
(see above). The goal is for Jon to gain expertise in the training arena so  
that he can then run DDI workshops himself in other venues.

There were 10 applicants for this training opportunity, which was a great  
response. The Alliance hopes to offer a similar opportunity in the future.

DDI Moving Forward Advisory Group Begins to Meet

There was an animated discussion at the Toronto meeting in June about an  
Advisory Group (AG) to oversee DDI 4 development and govern the project.  
This AG has been set up and has held several meetings so far. The Advisory  
Group terms of reference and minutes of past meetings are available on the  
DDI wiki.

Scientific Board Chair Adam Brown notes that he sought nominations from the  
community to ensure a wide range of representation. The AG group membership  
consists of:


Adam Brown (Chair), Statistics NZ
Joachim Wackerow, GESIS
Larry Hoyle, University of Kansas
Dan Gillman, US Bureau of Labor Statistics
Arofan Gregory, Metadata Technology
Wendy Thomas, Minnesota Population Center
Steve McEachern, Australian Data Archive
Mary Vardigan, ICPSR
Kelly Chatain, Survey Research Operations, University of Michigan

Upcoming Sprints Announced

Plans are in place for the next two DDI sprints, to be held at Schloss  
Dagstuhl on October 20-24, 2014 (Sprint 5), and at the Institute of  
Education, University of London, on November 24-28 (Sprint 6). The Dagstuhl  
sprint, which will include 10 people funded by an NSF grant on enhanced  
citation, will focus on data citation, and on finalizing Simple Data  
Description and Simple Instrument with additional work done on Simple  
Codebook. Complex Data Description and Complex Instrument will also be  
addressed as will Qualitative Data and Methodology.

The London sprint will be dedicated to technical work with a focus on  
refining the renderings to XML and RDF; refining the production framework;  
technical modeling of new content; production of packages for review; and  
presentation tools (XSLT) for producing documentation.

In keeping with the Agile approach to development, there are targeted  
deliverables for each sprint, and the Advisory Group has endeavored to  
invite people with the requisite skills to ensure completion of the work.  
Please get in touch with Adam Brown, Chair of the DDI Scientific Board, if  
you have any questions or comments.

NADDI Conference Dates Announced

The 2015 North American DDI Users Conference, with the theme "Research Data  
Management: Enhancing Discoverability with Open Metadata Standards," will  
take place in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 8-10, 2015. The host of the  
conference is the Institute on Aging (IOA) of the University of  
Wisconsin-Madison.

The North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference (NADDI) is an  
opportunity for those using metadata standards and those interested in  
learning more to come together and learn from each other. NADDI 2015 will  
be a three-day conference (April 8-10) with invited and contributed  
presentations, and should be of interest to both researchers and data  
professionals in the social sciences and other disciplines. A full day of  
training sessions will precede the conference (April 8th).

Follow @NADDI2015 on Twitter!

Key Dates:


Open registration: 10/1/14

Open call for papers: 11/1/14

Submissions closed: 1/31/15

Acceptance notifications: 2/8/15

Early Bird registration ends: 3/15/15

Final versions of papers due: 3/31/15



NADDI 2015
Two New DDI Groups Forming

Training Group. At the Toronto meeting of DDI members, training was  
discussed with the goal of forming a group to address training issues.  
Subsequently the DDI Executive Board developed some recommendations related  
to the DDI Training Principles, and a small group has begun to meet. If you  
would like to join the team, please contact the Director.

Partnerships and Marketing Group. The need for a group to focus on  
marketing and partnerships was also discussed in Toronto with the objective  
of investigating and implementing new strategic alliances. To that end, a  
group has been formed with responsibility for such partnerships and for the  
broader area of marketing in general. To join this group, please contact  
the Director.

Open Data Packaging

Metadata Technology North America (MTNA) announces Open Data Packaging  
Services, designed to help transform datasets or databases into an open  
data package, ready for publication, analysis, long term preservation, or  
other purposes.
Metadata Technology North America logo
Leveraging MTNA technology and expertise, MTNA data and technology experts  
convert proprietary files or databases into open data packages, holding the  
information in ASCII text format, accompanied with core documentation and  
all necessary scripts and program for reading the data back into commonly  
used statistical software or analytical engines.


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