[DDI-users] DDI Directions Volume XV, Number 1, February 2017

[mcianna at umich.edu]

Having trouble viewing this message? Links disabled? Click or copy:
http://www.ddialliance.org/sites/default/files/ddi-directions-2017-02.pdf


*From the Director*

In this issue, we report on the recent 8th Annual European DDI Users
Conference and announce the upcoming 5th Annual North American DDI Users
Conference. We invite you to attend these conferences and, especially, to
present about your own DDI activities. We also invite DDI Alliance members
to attend our annual meeting on May 22nd in Lawrence, Kansas, where we'll
discuss the state of the Alliance, planning for a new strategic plan, and
DDI technical developments.

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


*In This Issue*

   - Save the Date: DDI Alliance to Meet in Lawrence, Kansas in May <#a01>
   - New Member Elected to DDI Alliance Executive Board <#a02>
   - Call for Papers for NADDI 2017, April 6-7 (Pre-Conference workshop
   April 5) <#a03>
   - 8th Annual EDDI Conference Held in Cologne, December 2016 <#a04>
   - Public Review of XKOS <#a05>
   - RWX: Top Impact Publications from the Last 20 Years <#a06>

Volume XV, Number 1, February 2017
Save the Date: DDI Alliance to Meet in Lawrence, Kansas in May

The DDI Alliance will hold its annual meeting on Monday, May 22, 2017, in
the Big 10 Room of the University of Kansas Memorial Union
<http://kumuprdemswb.home.ku.edu/emswebapp/LocationDetails.aspx?data=7cZwpiiplNuE8sYZ9UAYwJUTzlvC3jsxj4JXDQG%2f2ak%3d>
in Lawrence, Kansas (the day before the start of the IASSIST conference).
The morning will be devoted to the Meeting of Members and the afternoon to
the meeting of the Scientific Board with lunch provided in between. As
noted in previous years, in most cases it will be the same person attending
both meetings, but do feel free to send different people. More details
about the meeting will be available soon.
[image: IASSIST 2017] New Member Elected to DDI Alliance Executive Board

The Alliance held a January election to fill an opening on the Executive
Board. Dana Muller <http://www.iab.de/754/section.aspx/Mitarbeiter/251>,
head of the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment
Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg,
Germany, was elected to complete the 2015-2017 term of David Schiller.
[image: Dana Muller]

Sincere thanks are owed to David Schiller for his excellent service and
dedication during his time on the Executive Board.
Call for Papers for NADDI 2017, April 6-7 (Pre-Conference workshop
April 5) [image:
NADDI]

A Call for Papers is now open for the 5th Annual North American DDI Users
Conference hosted by the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research
(CISER) <https://ciser.cornell.edu/> and The Roper Center for Public
Opinion Research <https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/>. The theme for this
year's conference, “Metadata Across the Research Data Lifecycle,”
emphasizes the benefits of metadata creation early in the research data
lifecycle, as well as its subsequent re-use throughout.

Aimed at individuals working in and around data and metadata, NADDI 2017
seeks submissions of presentations and posters that highlight the use of
DDI and other metadata standards within research projects, survey
operations, academic libraries, and data archives. Also invited are
proposals that address the increasing need for interoperability of
standards in research data management and the leveraging of DDI to
facilitate data discovery and data integration. Presentations of an applied
nature are encouraged – how are you working with DDI and metadata generally
within the larger framework of research data management and the research
data lifecycle? Submissions of a more technical nature are also encouraged,
as well as presentations on the DDI standard itself and its continued
development.

For further details about the conference, please visit http://naddiconf.org.
The deadline for submissions is February 17, 2017. We hope to see you there!
8th Annual EDDI Conference Held in Cologne, December 2016

EDDI16 <http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi16/>, the 8th
Annual European DDI Users Conference, took place December 6-7, 2016, in
Cologne, Germany. The conference was hosted by GESIS - Leibniz Institute
for the Social Sciences, and 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.

There were 91 participants from 50 organizations in 17 countries in
attendance. The conference program
<http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi16/schedConf/program>
included 37 presentations and 6 posters, 3 tutorials, and 7 side meetings.
Keynote addresses were given by Keith Jeffery ("Metadata: Foundation,
Philosopher's and Rosetta Stones"), and Stefan Winkler-Nees ("Funding,
Policies, Community Building - Data Sharing from a Funders Perspective").

The presentation files
<http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi16/schedConf/presentations>
are now online. Presentations with a Creative Commons license also are
available in Zenodo <https://zenodo.org/communities/eddi16/>.

*Save the date for the next EDDI!*

EDDI2017 <http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi17> will be
hosted by FORS - Swiss Center of Expertise in the Social Sciences in
Lausanne, Switzerland on December 5-6, 2017.
Public Review of XKOS

The DDI Alliance recently conducted a Public Review of XKOS, an RDF
Vocabulary which extends the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
for the needs of statistical classifications. XKOS extends SKOS in two main
directions. First, it defines a number of terms that enable the
representation of statistical classifications with their structure and
textual properties, as well as the relations between classifications.
Second, it refines SKOS semantic properties to allow the use of more
specific relations between concepts. Those specific relations can be used
for the representation of classifications or for any other case where SKOS
is employed. XKOS adds the extensions that are desirable to meet the
requirements of the statistical community. More information
<http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/RDF/XKOS> can be found on the DDI
website.
RWX: Top Impact Publications from the Last 20 Years

*By Knut Wenzig*

*The DDI Community has produced a rich store of DDI and metadata-related
publications. Read-Write-Execute (RWX) will highlight some of these
existing publications as well as new work as it is produced. The first
column featured some of the foundations of DDI in scientific literature
<http://blog.surveydata.org/rwx-foundations-of-ddi-in-scientific-literature/>.
This second column will revisit some of the top impact publications related
to DDI from the last 20 years.*

It is not surprising that the DDI publications with many citations cover
more high level discussions rather than specific technical details. But
revisiting conceptual fundamentals or policy goals, comparing standards,
and evaluating approaches should also be done if one is currently planning
the next project. So, let's take a look at some of the top cited DDI
publications over the last 20 years.

When Ryssevik and Musgrave (2001) write about their social science dream
machine, they were thinking about the distributed NESSTAR system, which is
based on DDI. But there is nothing wrong with the idea of an “integrated
resource discovery gateway and search system to identify and locate these
resources” which consists of not less than “all existing empirical data”
(what is today called federated search). And being able to convert an
“extensive amount of metadata ... totally integrated with the data as such”
to a number of formats and copy them to a local machine is a reasonable
wish. The same holds true with “an efficient feedback system to the body of
metadata, allowing the user to add to the collecting memory of a data set”.
Even “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and
stewardship” (doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18
<http://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18>) from 2016, which are considered to
be state of the art, do not cover the range of features Ryssevik and
Musgrave describe.

The most cited publication in 2004 contains an important reminder:
“Technology itself, however, will not fulfill the promise of e-science,
Information and communication technologies provide the physical
infrastructure. It is up to national governments, international agencies,
research institutions, and scientists themselves to ensure the
institutional, financial and economic, legal, and cultural and behavioural
aspects of data sharing are taken into account.” (Arzberger et al. 2004:
137) The use of DDI, especially at ICPSR, serves as a use case for the
technological domain where access and usability and multiple use of the
data must be assured by interoperability.

While Arzberger et al. look at use cases from different disciplines in the
different identified domains, Willis, Greenberg and White (2012) compare
nine metadata standards in order to understand similarities and
differences. They consider DDI as the standard to describe social science
statistical data from experimental, observational, and statistical studies.
The objective to cover the whole data lifecycle is unique to DDI. DDI is
one of two standards which “are intended to be comprehensive, yet support
instances of description using a minimal number of required elements.” They
conclude that metadata scheme creation depends more on the goals than on
the discipline or type of data described (p.1517). At the same time the
common discipline specific approach contributes “to artificial boundaries
between disciplines and impede interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
reuse” (p. 1516).

For Jeffrey et al. (2014), who describe the CERIF approach to design a
research information management system, domain specific metadata standards
build the lowest of three levels of information. The first level consists
of information on research output (organized by flat metadata like Dublin
Core similar to a catalogue card). The second level is built by contextual
metadata, which can generate the discovery metadata of level one and point
to the domain metadata of level three (which could be DDI). The contextual
metadata hold information about base entities (e.g., persons and
publications) and connect them using a semantic layer with flexible link
entities, which can express roles (defined by a term which captures the
semantics and a controlled vocabulary to which the term belongs (p. 10) and
have a start and end date). Using this semantic layer a publication can
have an author, a publication date, and even a country of publication
(using so called localisation entities).

This small list of four top publications related to DDI:

   - shows us that looking more than 15 years back might yield new insights
   into new products from old ideas,
   - reminds us that technology does not solve social problems,
   - reveals different perspectives on the discipline specific
   fragmentation of metadata standards,
   - and gives an insight into a concept of a flexible and expressive
   linking mechanism.

References (also available at Bibsonomy
<https://www.bibsonomy.org/user/knutwenzig/RWX022017>)

Arzberger, P., Schroeder, P., Beaulieu, A., Bowker, G., Casey, K.,
Laaksonen, L., Moorman, D., Uhlir, P. & Wouters, P. (2004). Promoting
Access to Public Research Data for Scientific, Economic, and Social
Development. Data Science Journal, 3, 135-152. doi:10.2481/dsj.3.135

Jeffery, K., Houssos, N., Jörg, B. & Asserson, A. (2014). Research
Information management: the CERIF approach. International Journal of
Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 9, 5-14. doi:10.1504/ijmso.2014.059142

Ryssevik, J. & Musgrave, S. (2001). The Social Science Dream Machine:
Resource Discovery, Analysis, and Delivery on the Web. Social Science
Computer Review, 19, 163-174. doi:10.1177/089443930101900203

Willis, C., Greenberg, J. & White, H. (2012). Analysis and Synthesis of
Metadata Goals for Scientific Data. Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, 63, 1505--1520. doi:10.1002/asi.22683

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
<http://www.diw.de/cv/en/kwenzig>, kwenzig at diw.de
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.icpsr.umich.edu/pipermail/ddi-users/attachments/20170216/3cc8feb3/attachment-0001.html