George Alter, Chair of the Structured Data Transformation Language (SDTL) Working Group of the DDI Alliance, explained during a 2 November 2020 Webinar the value of SDTL to the DDI community. SDTL is a new tool for creating machine actionable data provenance.
SDTL is an independent language for representing data transformation commands in statistical analysis packages, such as SPSS, Stata, SAS, R, and Python. Commands like RECODE, MERGE FILES, and VARIABLE LABELS are rendered in a structured format (JSON, XML, RDF) that is easy for machines to read and process. Command scripts translated into SDTL produce variable-level data transformation histories, which can be translated into natural language. SDTL can be added to Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and other metadata standards for use in data catalogs, codebooks, and other documentation.
A recording of the "Introduction to Structured Data Transformation Language (SDTL)" Webinar is now available on the DDI Alliance YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/62dLnRkwQUg. Presentation slides are also available: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/163363.
References:
- DDI Alliance: https://ddialliance.org/
- SDTL User Guide: http://c2metadata.gitlab.io/sdtl-docs
- Introduction to SDTL: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/156015
- Overview of the C2Metadata Project: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/156014
- SDTL Working Group: https://ddi-alliance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DDI4/pages/899547182/SDTL...
- C2Metadata Resource Page: http://c2metadata.mtna.us/
- C2Metadata Project: https://c2metadata.org/