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From the Director

This issue of DDI Directions includes a review of the successful EDDI conference in Denmark, as well as a reminder about the upcoming NADDI conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. There are a lot of exciting DDI 4.0 activities announced, including DDI-Views, a report from the recent Copenhagen Sprint, and a save-the-date notice for the April Sprint at NADDI. Thanks go to Kelly Chatain for putting together this newsletter and to all of the hardworking people who support DDI and are helping to spread its adoption.

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

 
In This Issue

Volume XIV, Number 2, February 2016

Save the Date: DDI Alliance to Meet in Norway May 30th

IASSIST 2016

The DDI Alliance will hold its annual meeting of members on Monday, May 30, 2016, in Bergen, Norway, just before the start of the IASSIST conference. More details about the meeting will be available soon.




New Members!

Statistics Denmark

The DDI Alliance recently welcomed Statistics Denmark as a Full Member. Mogens Grosen Nielsen, Chief Adviser, Head of Metadata, will be the Member Representative.

Nooro Online Research

The Alliance also recently welcomed Nooro Online Research as an Associate Member.


DDI Alliance Website Survey

The redesigned DDI Alliance website launched in October 2015 and we'd like to know what you think! Along with a new design came new content: a training library, getting started how-to's, a new community section, and much more. As the DDI community grows we want to ensure that the Alliance site remains relevant, helpful, and informative for all audiences. Your feedback is vital to this effort, so please consider taking this 5 minute survey. And thank you!

Register for NADDI 2016, April 7-8 (Pre-Conference workshop April 6)

NADDI

Registration is now open for the North American DDI Users Conference hosted by the Health Research Data Repository, supported by the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton! This year's theme is Document, Discover, and Interoperate. NADDI is a three-day event, with workshops on April 6th and two days of presentations and meetings on April 7th & 8th.

NADDI provides opportunities to come together, connect, and learn from all who are actively using or are interested in learning about this community-developed metadata standard.

For more information please see the NADDI 2016 Conference site. The registration deadline is March 28, 2016. We hope to see you there!

DDI at AAPOR in Austin, TX, May 12-15

As part of ongoing efforts by the Marketing and Partnerships committee to promote DDI more broadly and gain new members, the DDI Alliance is targeting the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) annual conference this year, which will be held in Austin, TX, May 12-15. The AAPOR conference is one of the largest gatherings of survey researchers in the world. The Alliance is sharing a booth with ICPSR, several DDI-related papers have been accepted, and plans are underway to organize a side meeting for anyone interested in learning more about DDI. If you are planning to attend AAPOR, please contact Jared Lyle (lyle@umich.edu) – we would like to involve as many DDI community members as possible.

7Th Annual EDDI Conference Held in Copenhagen, December 2015

EDDI15, the 7th Annual European DDI User Conference, took place on December 2-3, 2015, in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference was hosted by Statistics Denmark (DST) and DDA/National Archive of Denmark, 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 83 participants from 44 organizations in 15 countries in attendance. The conference program included 33 presentations and posters, 3 tutorials, and 5 side meetings. Keynote addresses were given by Lars Thygesen and Carsten Zangenberg ("Building a statistics lighthouse for all decision makers"), and Henrik Pedersen ("The Danish National Forum for Research data Management").

Save the date for the next EDDI!
EDDI2016 will be held at GESIS Cologne on December 6-7, 2016.

DDI 4.0 Sprint Held in Copenhagen

A small team of DDI developers and designers gathered in Copenhagen prior to the EDDI15 conference. The top priority, automating the workflow for producing all work products and documentation, was successfully accomplished with a Bamboo build server and Ant process scripts. Design decisions accompanying this production system were also discussed and further defined. Topics included, but were not limited to, how Functional Views will be constructed and documented, RDF feedback from the Dagstuhl sprint, and the use of XMI and UML constructs. Read the full report on the DDI Collaboration Wiki, along with all of the supporting reports and documentation produced during the sprint.

Bamboo

Success!

Upcoming Sprints

The next DDI 4.0 sprint is planned for the week of April 11-15 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (the week after NADDI). The goal of the sprint is to complete a consistency review of the DDI4 modeling, particularly reviewing consistent use of patterns. If you can participate in the sprint (either in person or virtually), please contact Jared Lyle (lyle@umich.edu). More information will be posted here.

Another sprint is planned for the week of May 23-27 (the week before IASSIST). Details of this sprint, including goals and specific location in Norway, are under development.

DDI 4.0 Update

What's in a name?

As you look through the DDI Alliance collaboration site (Wiki, Issue Tracker, and Repository) you will see a new name cropping up, DDI-Views. The most innovative feature of DDI 4.0, from the user perspective, is the ability to focus on subsets of the overall library of classes by describing Functional Views. DDI-Views communicates this approach in a more meaningful way and will be used from now on for the products coming out of the Moving Forward Project.

The next Development Review of the DDI model is scheduled for the second quarter of 2016 and the DDI Technical Committee and Modeling Team look forward to a repeat of the high level of user response received during the first Development Review. The upcoming release will focus on the binding structures, the applied use of patterns such as collections and process models, and specific use Functional Views.

Preparation during this recent period has focused on ensuring the ability to produce accurate bindings for the model, automating and managing the production process, and clarifying what goes into a publication product. Results of the review process that took place during the Dagstuhl 2015 Sprint were incorporated along with the production system work completed at the Copenhagen EDDI 2015 Sprint. A clearer view on the work process is now available via viewable repositories of development activities and clearer documentation of modeling and process activities on the Modeling Team page.

A revision of the release plan can be found on the Moving Forward, Project Management page. It is a fluid document that will change to take advantage of opportunities as they arise as well as respond to unexpected delays in any particular Library Package or Functional View preparation.

New Version of Colectica Released

Collectica

In November 2015, Colectica announced the availability of 5.2.

Major new features include:

  • Classification Management based on GSIM and Neuchâtel
  • Improved IBM SPSS Data Collection
  • New default documentation templates
  • Controlled Vocabulary support
  • Expanded supported DDI content
  • Enhanced programmability in the Colectica SDK nuget package
  • Hundreds of new features and improvements

Read more about Colectica 5.2 here.