DDI Moving Forward: Integration of Core Components / DDI-based Infrastructure Vision

Motivation

Background

The DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) metadata standard, originally created in 1995 to document social science research data, has in recent years become relevant to new user groups, including the official statistics and medical research communities. In order to respond to these new users, DDI is developing a model-based specification (DDI Version 4) that can be expressed in XML Schema, RDF-S/OWL, relational database schema, and program languages. Such a data model will make it easier to interact with other disciplines and other standards, to understand the specification, to develop and maintain it in a consistent and structured way, and to enable software development that is less dependent on specific DDI versions.

Goals

The overall goal is to achieve a solid basis for a DDI 4 prototype. This workshop will extend and build upon the progress made during the past 4 years of development. It focuses on the integration of Data Description and Data Capture, and related modeling. Additionally, a plan for a DDI-based infrastructure for the empirical social sciences will be developed.