[DDI-users] DDI Directions Volume VIII, Number 3, July 2015

[mcianna at umich.edu]

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 From the Director

In this issue of DDI Directions, the lead story focuses on Schloss  
Dagstuhl, the setting for many recent DDI achievements and innovations. We  
are extremely fortunate to have access to such a venue, which has provided  
support for both training in the use of DDI and development of the DDI  
standard itself. Other stories highlight individuals who are playing new  
roles in the DDI community and we welcome their participation and  
involvement.

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


In This Issue


Schloss Dagstuhl - An Ideal Meeting Location
Four New Members Elected to DDI Alliance Executive Board
New DDI Executive Director Selected
New DDI Trainer Chosen
NADDI Meeting Held
First DDI Model Product Released
Seventh DDI Sprint Takes Place in Minneapolis
Alliance Meetings Held in Minneapolis
New DDI Representative at University of Guelph
Call for Papers for EDDI2015 Announced
Blog Post Mentions DDI and Reusable Metadata
CLOSER Knowledge Exchange Workshop on Metadata Held
SledgeHammer Pricing Changes
Colectica Announces New Releases
Comments and Volunteers for Open Source Metadata Registry Sought

Volume VIII, Number 3, July 2015

Schloss Dagstuhl - An Ideal Meeting Location

Since 2007, sixteen DDI development and training workshops have been held  
at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Institute for Informatics, an internationally  
renowned informatics center in Wadern, Germany.

What makes Dagstuhl so special? The primary feature of the venue is that  
everything is designed to support communication between participants. The  
remote location encourages participants to focus on the work without  
interruption, enabling intensive discussion and triggering new ideas. The  
seminar and break-out rooms are comfortable and conveniently located and  
bring people together for large and small meetings. Because participants  
stay for the week, they can work together through the day and continue into  
the evening if desired, but they can also take advantage of other social  
activities in the evening, such as ping-pong, billiards, or discussions in  
the wine cellar. Building relationships in this way results in more  
efficient communication and higher quality interactions overall, leading to  
enhanced productivity and good outcomes.

Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern, Germany Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern, Germany

Workshops and Outcomes

The DDI expert workshops have been supported and organized by the DDI  
Alliance and its members; GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social  
Sciences; the Open Data Foundation; and the University of Minnesota  
Population Center. Training workshops (also the two workshops on Semantic  
Statistics in 2011/2012) were organized by GESIS. Joachim Wackerow  
envisioned and initiated the Dagstuhl DDI workshops, and Arofan Gregory,  
Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan, and Joachim Wackerow have been the main  
organizers.

Combining training and expert workshops in sequence at the same location  
supports the process of building a community of qualified DDI users and  
specification developers. Often DDI users eventually become active  
contributors to further development. This is especially important for DDI  
as a community-driven standard.

Outcomes and products from the Dagstuhl expert workshops have included:


Next-generation DDI. The vision for the model-driven DDI was shaped at  
Dagstuhl in 2012 and since then the work has progressed to include the UML  
model and production framework for the new specification.
RDF ontologies. The DDI RDF Vocabulary Discovery (Disco) and XKOS, the  
Extended Knowledge Organization System, were created in workshops on  
Semantic Statistics in 2011 and 2012.
24 working papers. A rich set of papers on various topics related to DDI  
have been produced at Dagstuhl, including the Generic Longitudinal Business  
Process Model (GLBPM) paper and several other papers focused on using DDI  
to document longitudinal data.

A detailed list of the Dagstuhl workshops and related results is available  
on the DDI Alliance website.

This Year's Workshops

Two more workshops at Dagstuhl are planned for 2015:


A training workshop organized by GESIS and focusing on DDI Lifecycle will  
be held October 12-16, 2015. Participants will actively document real-world  
use cases to learn how best to employ the DDI model and associated  
technology.
A combined metadata workshop and sprint will take place the following week.  
This workshop will bring together invited representatives from other  
metadata standards to provide an external review of current DDI work. In  
parallel, participants will continue to develop the model-driven DDI  
specification.

Four New Members Elected to DDI Alliance Executive Board

The June 2015 election resulted in four new members joining the DDI  
Executive Board:


Bill Block, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) -  
2015-2019
Louise Corti, United Kingdom Data Archive (UKDA) - 2015-2019
David Schiller, Research Data Centre of the German Federal Employment  
Agency, Institute for Employment Research (IAB) - 2015-2017, completing the  
term of Gillian Nicoll
Joachim Wackerow, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences -  
2015-2019


Bill Block
Bill Block Louise Corti
Lousie Corti David Schiller
David Schiller Joachim Wackerow
Joachim Wackerow


Continuing members include:


Steve McEachern, Australian Data Archive (ADA) - 2013-2017
Leanne Trimble, University of Toronto, Scholars Portal - 2013-2017
George Alter, representing ICPSR, the Alliance Host Institution

The Alliance offers a warm welcome to the new Board, which will meet for  
the first time at the end of August.

Sincere thanks are owed to the outgoing Board members -- Mari Kleemola, Ron  
Nakao, Gillian Nicoll, and Anita Rocha -- for their excellent service and  
dedication. They accomplished a great deal during a short time and had a  
huge impact on professionalizing the organization.

New DDI Executive Director Selected

Jared Lyle
Jared Lyle

At its June 3 meeting in Minneapolis, the Board appointed Jared Lyle of  
ICPSR to serve as the next Executive Director of the Alliance, replacing  
Mary Vardigan, who had served in this capacity since the inception of the  
Alliance in 2003.

Jared will take over as Director in December, bringing new strengths and  
skills to the role. He is an Associate Archivist and Director of Curation  
Services at ICPSR where he supervises the ICPSR Metadata Unit. He advocates  
for best practices in data management and curation in many venues and is an  
instructor in the ICPSR Summer Program course "Curating and Managing  
Research Data for Reuse." He has a Master's degree from the University of  
Michigan's School of Information and has been active in facilitating  
partnerships between domain repositories and institutional repositories. He  
also coordinates activities of the Data Preservation Alliance for the  
Social Sciences (Data-PASS), a voluntary partnership of organizations  
created to archive, catalog, and preserve data used for social science  
research.

New DDI Trainer Chosen

Michelle Edwards
Michelle Edwards

Michelle Edwards from the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic  
Research (CISER) at Cornell University in the US has been chosen as the new  
DDI trainer and will participate in the train the trainer workshop at  
Schloss Dagstuhl on October 12-16.

Michelle has an MLIS degree and has been active in the academic library  
community for several years. While at the University of Guelph, she helped  
to develop a Best Practices document for DDI markup to be used by data  
librarians across Canada. She also presented about the merits and benefits  
of DDI to the Statistics Canada Standards Division. With respect to  
instruction, she has taught several courses and workshops on topics such as  
using secondary data, working with statistical software, and quantitative  
literacy. Looking ahead, Michelle has a vision "to bring DDI to the  
researchers in a form they will embrace and use," and she has a number of  
concrete ideas related to realizing this vision.

Five very qualified people applied for the position, and we hope to offer  
this program again in coming years with support from the DDI Alliance and  
GESIS.

NADDI Meeting Held
Michelle Edwards
Approximately 55 people from three countries attended the 2015 NADDI  
Conference, which was held April 8-9 and hosted by the Institute on Aging  
(IOA) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barry Radler of the MIDUS  
project led the local organizers team, which also included Elise Dunham,  
Jeremy Iverson, Cindy Severt, and Dan Smith.

Dr. Tito Castillo, Founder & Managing Director, Xperimint Ltd., delivered  
the Keynote Address on the topic of "From 'Data Discoverability' to 'Data  
Navigability.'"

The conference program was notable in that several researchers presented  
about using DDI for complex longitudinal projects, and there were sessions  
related to libraries' data and metadata policies and experiences.

First DDI Model Product Released

The first draft release of the new model-based DDI was put out for comment  
in May, with the review period extended through mid-June to allow members  
to complete their review and submit issues.

The Technical Committee is now working on addressing the comments raised in  
the review. A total of 74 issues were filed. As of mid-July the Technical  
Committee had performed an initial review on the first 60 issues. Related  
issues were grouped into categories -- for example, general documentation  
issues, RDF documentation issues, modeling rules, GSIM-related issues,  
consistency, etc. A number of reviewers provided comments on the review  
process itself, most of which were quite positive. When the Technical  
Committee completes the review of the submitted issues, it will prepare a  
report on the overall review results for the Modeling Team and the DDI  
Alliance.

Seventh DDI Sprint Takes Place in Minneapolis

Twenty people took part in the seventh DDI sprint, held May 24-28, the week  
before the IASSIST meeting in Minneapolis. A good deal of progress was made  
during the week in the areas of:


Methodology
Production framework
Data description
Drupal enhancements
Comprehensive citation
Data capture
Simple codebook

The citation work built on outcomes of a meeting held at Schloss Dagstuhl  
in 2014. Funded by the NSF (1448107), the meeting focused on ensuring that  
the capability for comprehensive citation information would be integrated  
into the model-based DDI.

As noted above in the first story of the newsletter, the next sprint will  
take place October 19-23 at Schloss Dagstuhl, followed by another sprint  
before or after the EDDI meeting in Copenhagen.

Alliance Meetings Held in Minneapolis

The DDI Alliance Annual Meeting of Member Representatives and the Meeting  
of the Scientific Board were held on June 1 in Minneapolis, MN, in advance  
of the IASSIST 2015 conference. Both meetings were well attended and  
productive. Members expressed support for a tiered membership model and new  
expenditures for marketing and training. The meetings closed with a  
celebration of the 20 th anniversary of DDI, which began in 1995.


Annual Meeting of Member Representatives 20 years of DDI


New DDI Representative at University of Guelph

Carol Perry has taken over for Michelle Edwards at University of Guelph.  
Welcome aboard, Carol!

Call for Papers for EDDI2015 Announced

A Call for Papers for the 7th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI15)  
was recently announced, with a deadline of September 6, 2015. EDDI will  
take place December 2-3, 2015, in Copenhagen, Denmark, hosted by Statistics  
Denmark and the Danish Data Archive/National Archive of Denmark. 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. More information is available on the  
Conference web page.

Blog Post Mentions DDI and Reusable Metadata

A recent blog post from the International Journal of Market Research gave  
DDI and the Call for Action for Questionnaire Documentation project a nice  
plug. Jon Johnson, Institute of Education, University College London, and  
Louise Corti, UK Data Archive, headed up this effort to document  
instruments in DDI through the use of profiles that structure the output of  
computer-assisted interviewing software.

CLOSER Knowledge Exchange Workshop on Metadata Held

On May 21, a CLOSER Knowledge Exchange Workshop was held at the British  
Library to provide an overview of best practice in using metadata to  
enhance data management processes. Speakers and topics included:


Jon Johnson, CLOSER - "Why metadata is awesome - How DDI-Lifecycle can be  
used to enhance data management"
Louise Corti, UK Data Archive - "How metadata drives The Archive"
Gemma Seabrook, CLOSER - "Making use of DDI to drive the CLOSER search  
platform"
Jeremy Iverson, Colectica - "An in-depth presentation on metadata  
management tools"

SledgeHammer Pricing Changes

The OpenDataForge SledgeHammer Pro software has been recently approved by  
the US General Services Administration (GSA) for purchase through the GSA  
Advantage program. US Federal government agencies can now license the tool  
at a preferred rate of $259/user, with further volume discounts available  
(10-50:$239/user, 50+: $219/user).

The same licensing rates are also being extended to US State agencies,  
qualifying academic institutions, and not-for-profit organizations.  
Low-cost subscriptions remain available at $29/3-month and $99/year. For  
further information, purchase, network/server deployment, or other custom  
configurations, please contact info at mtna.us.

Colectica Announces New Releases

Colectica recently released new versions of Colectica and Colectica for  
Excel.

Colectica 5.1 now supports DDI Codebook 2.x and DDI Lifecycle 3.1, and 3.2  
and has the following new features:


Metadata quality check reports
SPSS 23 and Stata 14 support
In-depth documentation and tutorials
Expanded supported DDI content
New Colectica SDK nugget packages
Hundreds of new features and improvements

The new release of Colectica for Excel, version 5, supports:


DDI 3.2
Simplified code list editor
Greatly improved performance
Multiple identifiers for Variables
Improved support for Excel 2013 multiple windows

The Professional version now supports importing Stata up to version 13 and  
importing SPSS up to version 23. Contact Colectica for more information.

Comments and Volunteers for Open Source Metadata Registry Sought

Sam Spencer at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has issued a  
request for comments and volunteers for an open source ISO 11179 metadata  
registry called the Aristotle Metadata Registry (Aristotle-MDR).  
Aristotle-MDR is a Django/Python application that provides an authoring  
environment for a wide variety of 11179 compliant metadata objects with a  
focus on being multilingual. Sam is hoping to raise interest among bug  
checkers, translators, experienced HTML and Python programmers and data  
modelers for mapping of ISO 11179 to DDI3.2 (and potentially other formats).


The github
The demo/dev instance
Screenshots

If you find bugs or identify areas of work, feel free to raise them either  
by emailing Sam or by raising a bug on Github.


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