[DDI-users] DDI Directions Volume XIV, Number 3, September 2016

[mcianna at umich.edu]

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 From the Director

In this issue of DDI Directions, in addition to reporting on conferences  
and meetings, we highlight the contributions of DDI members engaged in  
working groups or committees. The vast majority of Alliance progress would  
not be possible without their efforts. If you see a group or committee to  
which you would like to contribute, please feel free to reach out to the  
chair (listed on the web site), or directly to me.

Also in this issue, we have a new column, "Read-Write-Execute (RWX)",  
written by Knut Wenzig (DIW Berlin), that will highlight both existing and  
new DDI and metadata-related publications produced by the DDI Community.  
Special thanks to Knut for writing this column. And special thanks to Kelly  
Chatain for compiling and editing these newsletters. Starting in 2017, the  
DDI Newsletter will begin publishing quarterly instead of three times a  
year.

Jared Lyle, Director, DDI Alliance, lyle at umich.edu


In This Issue


NADDI 2016 Report
Annual Meetings Held in Bergen, Norway
New Members!
New Member Representatives
New Premium Membership option
Updates from Working Groups and Committees

Marketing and Partnerships Group
Training Group
Technical Committee
Moving Forward

News of the Executive Board

Bill Block selected as Vice Chair of Executive Board
Margaret Levenstein joins the Executive Board
George Alter leaving Executive Board
Scientific Board Election Results

Announcements

EDDI16
DDI Webinar
New SAS import for Colectica for Excel
Blaise/Colectica partnership

Read-Write-Execute (RWX)

Foundations of DDI in Scientific Literature


Volume XIV, Number 3, September 2016

NADDI 2016 Report
NADDI 2016
With 75 registered participants representing 34 organizations, many of whom  
were new to the DDI community, the 4th Annual North American DDI Conference  
was held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada April 7-8. The Health Research Data  
Repository hosted the event, supported by the Faculty of Nursing at the  
University of Alberta.

The conference program of 15 presentations and 4 workshops reflected a wide  
variety of potential and practical uses of DDI within the social science  
community and beyond, such as helping to drive a new health data ecosystem,  
managing heterogeneous longitudinal weather data, and addressing the needs  
of geospatial data and time-based media. Keynote addresses were given by  
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Associate Director of the Women and Children's Health  
Research Institute, and Dr. Larry Hoyle ("The Evolution of DDI - Concepts  
and Technology"), Senior Scientist at the University of Kansas Institute  
for Policy & Social Research. In addition to the program, Colectica and  
Nooro Online Research partnered to provide a demonstration of DDI's  
interoperability by creating, distributing, and documenting the  
conference's feedback survey in real-time.

NADDI 2017 will be held at Ithaca, New York on April 5-7, 2016.

Annual Meetings Held in Bergen, Norway
Annual Meetings Bergen Norway
The DDI Alliance Annual Meeting of Member Representatives and the Meeting  
of the Scientific Board were held on May 30 in Bergen, Norway, in advance  
of the IASSIST 2016 conference. The Annual Meeting of Member  
Representatives included a State of the Alliance presentation by Steve  
McEachern's (Chair of the Executive Board), as well as reports from the  
Marketing, Training, and Moving Forward groups; the Meeting of the  
Scientific Board included an activity report by the Technical Committee.  
Both meetings were well attended and productive.

New Members!

CESSDA

The DDI Alliance recently welcomed the Consortium of Social Science Data  
Archives (CESSDA) as a Full Member. Hossein Abroshan, Chief Technical  
Officer, is the Member Representative.

mStats DS Data Science and Statistical Software Midlife in the United States

The Alliance also recently welcomed mStats DS – Data Science and  
Statistical Software (Marcel Hebing, representative) and the University of  
Wisconsin Institute on Aging – MIDUS study (Barry Radler, representative)  
as Associate Members.

New Member Representatives

Ben Abrahamse has replaced Katherine McNeill as the member representative  
for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Tayyeb Akram has  
replaced Simon Saint-Georges as the member representative for Epidemiology  
France, Aviesan - ITMO SantPublique. Welcome, Ben and Tayyeb, and thank you  
for your service, Kate and Simon!

New Premium Membership option

Members now have the option to become premium members. Premium membership  
provides all the rights and obligations described in the Bylaws, with  
additional marketing and visibility benefits. Premium Members are featured  
on the DDI Alliance website and are authorized to use a “DDI Alliance  
Premium Member” logo on their own website. It is expected that Premium  
members would include software vendors providing products or services based  
on DDI, large users or implementers of DDI, serious stakeholders in the  
mission of the DDI Alliance, and any organization that finds value in  
having its contributions and commitment to DDI publicly recognized.

Updates from Working Groups and Committees

Marketing and Partnerships Group

The goals of the DDI Marketing and Partnerships group are to increase  
adoption and use of DDI, to grow the DDI Alliance membership, and to  
coordinate DDI branding and messaging. The Executive Board has identified  
attendance at professional conferences as an important vehicle for  
accomplishing these aims, and the Marketing and Partnerships group has been  
developing marketing materials, displays, and procedures to maximize impact  
at these conferences. This past spring the Marketing and Partnerships group  
represented the DDI Alliance at the American Association of Public Opinion  
Research (AAPOR) conference in Austin, Texas, where we shared a booth with  
ICPSR, distributed marketing materials, sponsored a reception, and had a  
number of DDI presentations and posters on the AAPOR program.
American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference
In the coming months, we will be conducting followups with contacts made at  
the AAPOR conference, and attending and sponsoring the Conference on Survey  
Methods in Multinational, Multiregional, and Multicultural Contexts (3MC)  
in Chicago. We are also coordinating a presence at the International Blaise  
Users Conference in The Hague in October.

A primary vehicle for promoting and marketing DDI is the DDI Alliance  
website. A new DDI logo and website design was unveiled in 2015, and the  
Marketing and Partnerships group will continue working with the Web group  
during the next three months to modify and improve the website, guided by  
formal feedback gathered via a session at the NADDI 2016 conference as well  
as informal and ad hoc suggestions from the DDI community. The Marketing  
and Partnerships group will also be coordinating with the Training group to  
create DDI introduction/tutorial to serve as a video on the website and/or  
as a rolling presentation displayed at our conference booth.

Training Group

The purpose of the Training Group is to improve people's comfort level and  
competence in working with DDI, bring in new users (and members), gear  
training to specific audiences, and develop expertise within the community  
for training purposes. Training Group priorities for the next quarter  
include updating the web site and creating interactive, introductory  
multimedia for our online users.

Technical Committee

The Technical Committee has had a busy summer. We are preparing a number of  
products for review. This includes packaging, documenting, preparing  
announcements, setting up the pages and issues trackers for each product  
and then responding to the comments received during the review. Each of the  
next few months is focused on getting a different product out for review:


June – RDF Vocabularies: DISCO and XKOS
July – Q2 2016 DDI4 Development Review
August – DDI-Lifecycle 3.3 followed but updated high level documentation  
for DDI-Lifecycle 3.2
September – Special development release of the Codebook Functional View of  
DDI4

Moving Forward

DDI Moving Forward is an ongoing project to develop the next version of DDI  
(4). DDI is transitioning to a model-driven specification to support new  
content and domains, to provide needed flexibility in rendering and  
packaging, and to ensure a sustainable development process for DDI going  
forward. The model will enable use-case driven "functional views" of the  
full model so that prospective DDI users can receive only the subset of DDI  
classes they need for a specific task or function (eg, create a simple  
codebook). The transition also includes moving to a fully automated  
production framework to create the specification, bindings, and  
documentation. Read more information about the DDI work products and how  
they all fit together.

The DDI Alliance welcomes members of the DDI community to contribute to  
Moving Forward efforts, but also emphasizes that DDI 4 is still in  
development. In the meantime, the DDI Alliance encourages the use of its  
existing and fully functioning DDI 2 (Codebook) and DDI 3 (Lifecycle)  
versions.

Moving Forward Sprints

The Moving Forward project hosted development sprints in April and May. The  
first sprint, held in Edmonton, Canada at the same time as the North  
American DDI conference, focused on completing a consistency review of the  
DDI 4 modeling, particularly reviewing consistent use of patterns and  
documentation content. The second sprint, held in Norway prior to IASSIST  
2016, focused on finalizing, documenting, and testing the Codebook  
Functional View.

The next Moving Forward sprints are planned for October at Schloss Dagstuhl  
- Leibniz Center for Informatics in Germany. The first week will bring  
together representatives from other metadata standards to review the  
current DDI work and discuss how best to work collaboratively. The second  
week will extend and build upon the progress made during the past three  
years of development, focusing on four main areas of work: creating  
re-usable multi-purpose documentation; controlled vocabularies; complex  
data capture and description; and funding proposals.

Read more about the sprints on the DDI Collaboration Wiki.

News of the Executive Board

Bill Block selected as Vice Chair of Executive Board
Bill Block
Bill Block was selected by the Executive Board in April to serve as Vice  
Chair. In addition to serving as Vice Chair, Bill will lead Annual Meetings  
of the Membership Representatives in the absence of the Chair of the  
Executive Board.



Margaret Levenstein joins the Executive Board
Maggie Leventein
ICPSR's new director, Dr. Margaret Levenstein, joined the Executive Board  
in June. Maggie has extensive experience working with and stewarding data,  
including serving as the executive director of the Michigan Census Research  
Data Center (MCRDC), a joint project with the US Census Bureau. We are  
excited to welcome Maggie to the Executive Board.


George Alter leaving Executive Board

We thank George Alter, ICPSR's former director, for his service on the  
Executive Board. George has been a long-time champion of high quality  
metadata, especially DDI metadata. While George plans to remain active in  
the DDI community, we'll miss his many contributions to the Board.

Scientific Board Election Results
Achim Wackerow Michelle Edwards
In May, elections were held for the positions of Chair and Vice-Chair of  
the Scientific Board. Achim Wackerow (GESIS) was elected as Chair, with  
Michelle Edwards (CISER) elected as Vice-Chair. The Scientific Board: 1.  
Contributes to the substantive content of DDI standards and semantic  
products and approve major version revisions. 2. Evaluates technical  
proposals through the Alliance standards review process. 3. Undertakes  
research and testing concerning proposals for DDI standards and semantic  
products. 4. Develops and promulgates best practices for use of DDI  
standards and semantic products. 5. Assesses progress and barriers to  
progress. 6. Suggests future directions and activities for the Alliance.  
The Technical Committee is a standing committee of the Scientific Board.  
The Scientific Board also has direct oversight of the Moving Forward  
project (DDI4).

Announcements

EDDI16

The 8th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI16) will take place  
December 6-7, 2016 in Cologne, Germany. EDDI16 is organized jointly by  
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC of IZA -  
International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.  
The meeting will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over  
Europe and the world. This year, the conference organizers are encouraging  
papers which focus on re-use of software and re-use of administered  
software. Examples of this could be question banks, re-use of software  
components and provision of services which foster re-use. Also encouraged  
are papers which discuss barriers to the creation and uptake and  
maintenance of such re-use. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or  
using DDI is invited to attend and present. More information is available  
on the Conference web page.

DDI Webinar

On September 28th at 19:00 UTC, Jon Johnson (Centre for Longitudinal  
Studies, Institute of Education, University College London – CLOSER), Jared  
Lyle (ICPSR), and Barry Radler (University of Wisconsin Institute on Aging  
– MIDUS study) will be presenting a Webinar, titled "A DDI Primer: An  
overview and examples of DDI in action," for the ICPSR Data Fair. Register  
now. Feel free to share widely!
New SAS import for Colectica for Excel

SAS import for Colectica for Excel is here! The Colectica Team is happy to  
announce the release of a new version of Colectica for Excel and Colectica  
for Excel Professional. New features included in this update are:


Importing SAS sas7bdat data files
Importing SAS sas7bcat catalog files

For more information visit the Colectica website.

Blaise/Colectica partnership

Colectica and Blaise Statistics Netherlands have agreed to enter into a  
long term partnership starting with building two software products. These  
two products will allow survey researchers to build surveys faster, to  
leverage metadata standards, and to generate rich documentation and  
reports. The tools will improve transparency into the data capture process.  
Blaise Colectica Visual Survey Designer will offer an intuitive survey  
design surface and questionnaire palette, allowing survey designers to  
build questionnaires without learning a domain specific language. Surveys  
designed with this tool can be fielded using Blaise 5 on the desktop, on  
the Web, and on mobile devices. The software will store questionnaire  
specifications using open standards, and can connect to metadata  
repositories and question banks powered by Colectica software. Blaise  
Colectica DDI Connector will convert Blaise 5 data models to and from the  
Data Documentation Initiative's (DDI) standard for documenting surveys and  
statistical data. “This partnership will make it possible that more types  
of users will be able to use Blaise 5 with less training and less  
programming knowledge required. This leads to faster Survey Development and  
this is enhanced by the possible use of a Question Bank and standardized  
DDI metadata. I'm very pleased with this partnership” Harry Wijnhoven MSc,  
Member of the Board of Directors and Dep. CIO of Statistics Netherlands/CBS  
and CEO Blaise. The survey design tools will launch at the 17th  
International Blaise Users Conference (IBUC) www.aanmelder.nl/ibuc2016 .  
IBUC takes place from 4-6 October 2016 in The Hague, Netherlands.

Read-Write-Execute (RWX)

The DDI Community has produced a rich store of DDI and metadata-related  
publications over the last 20 years. Read-Write-Execute (RWX) will  
highlight some of these existing publications as well as new work as it is  
produced. This first column will feature some of the foundations of DDI in  
scientific literature. (Thanks to Achim Wackerow for his suggestions.) At  
the same time, a bibliography of DDI articles, working papers, and  
presentations is being built and is available at Bibsonomy.org with easily  
reusable bibliographic metadata. This metadata will also be made available  
on the DDI Alliance website. Suggestions for papers and topics for RWX, or  
the bibliography, are appreciated and can be sent to: Knut Wenzig,  
kwenzig at diw.de.

Foundations of DDI in Scientific Literature

In her paper “The DDI matures: 1997 to the Present”, Mary Vardigan (2013),  
the former Director of the DDI Alliance, presents a timeline of the  
conceptual and organizational development of DDI. The initial SGML Codebook  
Committee meeting occurred in 1995, but 1997 was the year of the first  
“instantiation in XML” (Vardigan 2013: 45). DDI started (in versions 1 and  
2) to describe data sets by the codebook approach, which is still supported  
and widely in use. From version 3 on the scope was broadened to document  
the whole lifecycle of data, using data collection as a starting point, and  
finally enabling repurposing and reuse of DDI elements. [1] The paper ends  
with a list of high level design goals, referred to in “Developing a  
Model-Driven DDI Specification” (Participants in 2012 Dagstuhl Seminar on  
DDI Moving Forward, 2012), on which the next version of DDI is based.

The first reference listed in Mary Vardigan's paper is “Providing Global  
Access to Distributed Data Through Metadata Standardisation - the Parallel  
Stories of NESSTAR and the DDI”, submitted by the Norwegian Social Science  
Data Services and prepared by Jostein Ryssevik (1999). The “relative  
distance between the end-users of a statistical material and the production  
process” (p. 2) was identified as the fundamental problem to be solved. As  
discovery systems were provided to address this problem, the need for  
metadata standards like DDI emerged. The authors recall that DDI used the  
new (at the time) XML language, and that the defined XML code could contain  
the description of the document itself, of the study, the file, the  
variables, and other study-related materials. Already in this early paper  
RDF (Resource Description Framework [2] ) is described as an application  
“that provides the foundation for metadata interoperability across  
different resource description communities.” (p. 5) Using DDI as a  
language, the medium NESSTAR could deliver a great range of interconnected  
services and platforms. Even if the last release of NESSTAR is more than  
one year old, the ideas in the article - whether or not realized by the  
software - deserve to be revisited. Using the metaphoric antonym of Bazaars  
vs. Cathedrals, the same authors (Ryssevik 2000) conceptualize their vision  
of - even then! - metadata systems that cover the complete life-cycle.

The article “The Data Documentation Initiative”, by Grant Blank and Karsten  
Boye Rasmussen (2004), was published in Social Science Computer Review, one  
of the top ranked academic journals in the “Information Science & Library  
Science” category. The authors describe the requirements of data  
documentation in the social sciences, how DDI as an XML based standard can  
be used to store information presented in codebooks, and how  
“standardization creates new opportunities for software development to aid  
users.” (p. 314)

Today, after 20 years, we can read and reevaluate those ideas only because  
people took the time to write them down. In this sense contributing to the  
scientific inventories of knowledge should be understood as a best practice  
and an integral part of software development for the academic community.

References

(also available at Bibsonomy)

Blank, G. & Rasmussen, KB (2004), 'The Data Documentation Initiative: The  
Value and Significance of a Worldwide Standard', Social Science Computer  
Review 22 (3), 307-318, doi:10.1177/0894439304263144.

Participants in 2012 Dagstuhl Seminar on DDI Moving Forward (2012),  
Developing a Model-Driven DDI Specification, DDI Working Paper Series  
(Other Topics) DDI Alliance, doi:10.3886/DDIWorkingPaper04.

Ryssevik, J. & The Norwegian Social Science Data Services (1999), Providing  
Global Access to Distributed Data through Metadata Standardisation--the  
Parallel Stories of Nesstar and the DDI, Conference of European Statistics,  
UN/ECE Work Session on Statistical Metadata (Geneva, Switzerland, 22-24  
September 1999), Working Paper 10,  
http://www.unece.org/stats/documents/1999/09/metis/10.e.pdf.

Ryssevik, J. & The Norwegian Social Science Data Services (2000), Bazaar  
Style Metadata in the Age of the Web--An 'Open Source' Approach to Metadata  
Development, Conference of European Statistics, UN/ECE Work Session on  
Statistical Metadata (Washington DC, United States, 28-30 November 2000),  
Working Paper 4,  
http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/documents/2000/11/metis/4.e.pdf.

Vardigan, M.; Heus, P. & Thomas, W. (2008), 'Data Documentation Initiative:  
Toward a Standard for the Social Sciences', International Journal of  
Digital Curation 3 (1), 107-113, doi:10.2218/ijdc.v3i1.45.

Vardigan, M. (2013), 'The DDI Matures: 1997 to the Present', IASSIST  
Quarterly 37 (1--4), 45-50,  
http://www.iassistdata.org/sites/default/files/iq/iqvol371_4_vardigan.pdf

[1] Version 3 is described in Vardigan, Heus, Thomas 2008.
[2] Vardigan (2013: 48) expects that RDF will be used in the upcoming  
version of DDI as a connection to the semantic web.


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