This best practice covers the process of developing agreements and guidelines for implementation and governance of DDI as a metadata scheme for a community. The best practice recognizes that different communities will, by necessity, have different processes for this, and offers a checklist of issues for communities to consider before implementing DDI.
Best Practices
Best Practices Across the Data Life Cycle
These Best Practices provided reflect the work of 25 individuals who came together in a workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl, in Wadern Germany, in November 2008. The documents are the first attempt to define procedures for using DDI optimally and as such are not considered "final."
Best Practices for Longitudinal Data
These papers on using DDI to document longitudinal data are the outcomes of a workshop held at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany, October 18-22, 2010. Workshop participants representing seven countries came together to write the papers, which focus on applying DDI 3 to complex, longitudinal data.
The best practice authors and editors welcome your feedback on the usability of the documents and priorities for new best practices. Please send your comments and suggestions to ddi-bp-editors@icpsr.umich.edu
DDI Best Practices
Describes the best practices for metadata producers to provide end users with the resources for data discovery and dissemination.
This Best Practice discusses workflows for DDI usage in the context of archival ingest and metadata enhancement, beginning at the point of the handoff between the data provider and the archive.
This best practice discusses the capturing, in DDI metadata, of the processes of data aggregation, recoding and data processing.
The benefits of using controlled vocabularies within DDI metadata creation are the primary underlying principles behind this Best Practice document. Use of a controlled vocabulary enhances consistency and efficiency in the production of DDI metadata, gives precision in searching the DDI metadata, and allows semantic and technical interoperability between organisations creating DDI instances.
This document outlines recommended best practices for creating a local DDI 3.0 Profile, which is a subset of DDI 3.0 fields to be used by an organization or shared by a community of users. The DDI 3.0 specification is extensive and designed to cover a multiplicity of use cases. However, not all of DDI’s possible applications will be relevant at the level of specific organizations or user communities. By creating and implementing user-specific profiles, organizations will: Ensure that DDI documentation is suited to their particular requirements; Expedite and simplify DDI production and processing; Optimize interoperability and facilitate document sharing with other DDI users. The guidelines included in this document are intended to assist potential users in building a technically accurate and complete profile that will serve as an effective tool in managing DDI instances as well as data sharing operations.
The intention of resource packages in DDI is to provide a publishing structure that promotes reuse of common material by removing certain metadata content from the context of a specific study and publishing it for the primary purpose of reuse. Reuse of common material such as concept schemes, geographic location schemes, and coding schemes provides implicit comparison between those studies that reference a common source of information. Publication of DDI schemes as resource packages both within organizations or projects and for broader public access requires the consideration of how these materials may be used and incorporated into other studies. Resource packages need to be structurally designed to facilitate reuse among the potential users of the content. In addition, the publication of similar schemes as resource packages supports potential comparison and publication of the structured relationship between two or more schemes. Resource packages are published with the primary intention that their contents be reused and therefore the expectation that they will be maintained and available in perpetuity.
One of the objectives in creating DDI 3.0 was full machine-actionability. This requires strict versioning of objects so that users understand the change history of the resources they are using. This Best Practice is designed to provide some guidelines to metadata creators and publishers about how to version metadata and publish it for others to use.
The authors believe that it is currently premature to recommend a ‘best practice’ for interacting effectively with registries. Instead, this document defines registries and provides a justification for using them. It begins by giving relevant definitions and discussing the general business case and then goes on to describe from a high-level perspective the use of registries that allow researchers to access material. It concludes by describing examples of researcher use cases.
This best practices document looks at a possible way to design components that can be combined to create DDI applications. Given that object-oriented design is the most common programming paradigm, and that systems are often based around service-oriented principles, and given the modular design of DDI 3.0 itself, this document provides an architectural model that can be a reference point for implementers. The document also takes into consideration issues of maintenance and management of DDI applications, and discusses best practices for application documentation and configuration. The focus is on interoperability of DDI applications.