Using DDI 3.0 to Support Preservation, Management, Access, and Dissemination Systems for Social Science Data

November 3 - 7, 2008
GESIS Workshop at the Leibniz Center for Informatics
Schloss Dagstuhl, Wadern, Germany

Course Instructors:
Arofan Gregory (Open Data Foundation, Tucson, Arizona, USA)
Wendy L. Thomas (Minnesota Population Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)
Joachim Wackerow (GESIS-ZUMA, Mannheim, Germany)

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) has produced an international XML standard for the use of lifecycle information about social science research data. Version 3.0 was published in April 2008. DDI facilitates the automation of documentation and production systems for the delivery of social science data. This workshop is geared toward the staff of archives and data producing agencies. The five-day structure of this workshop provides the participants with an opportunity for in-depth assistance on the specialized features of DDI that are important to their organization’s activities.

New features in DDI 3.0 support:
- metadata capture from planning and production to dissemination and analysis
- reuse of metadata to drive subsequent production or analysis processes
- ISO 11179 compliant data registries such as question, variable, and concept banks
- grouping of study series for longitudinal and comparative research
- capturing comparative information for the creation of harmonized data
- improved capture of archival information for data organization and management

The workshop provides the opportunity to get an in-depth look at this major new release of DDI. The workshop is organized in cooperation with the DDI Alliance. Further information on DDI can be found below.

Intended audience: anyone interested in DDI, no prior knowledge of DDI or XML is required.

Further information on the workshop is available at the GESIS workshop pages:
http://www.gesis.org/Veranstaltungen/ZUMA/Workshops/WS_2008/DDI_2008-11.htm

The Open Data Foundation is pleased to announce that an ODaF Europe 2008 meeting will take place at the UK Data Archive on April 14-15. This regional event is open to all members as well as individuals and agencies interested to learn more about ODaF or to share ideas. For further information and registration, see
http://www.opendatafoundation.org/events/odaf_europe_2008.php

Looking into the future, we currently anticipate holding a US regional meeting on Oct 2-3 at the Sun Microsystems headquarters in Manhattan, NY and our Annual Meeting in Washington DC in December. The Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Germany and the Open Data Foundation (ODaF) are also happy to announce that ODaF Europe 2009 will be hosted on the IZA campus in Bonn next spring (details to be announced in time).

The UKDA Data Exchange Tools (DExT) in collaboration with the Open Data Foundation has just released a new version of a Java package for reading SPSS data files and export metadata in DDI 2.0 and DDI 3.0 CR 2 formats. The library allows allows for the export of the data in varous ASCII formats. The package can be retrieved at:
http://forge.opendatafoundation.org/gf/project/ukda_dext/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=1
It is a sub-component of a DExT application that preservation and dissemination of data and metadata in standard formats.

The 2007 Annual Meeting of the Open Data Foundation will take place at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) office in Washington, DC on Wednesday December 19th from 9am-5pm. We would like to thank Dr. Julia Lane for her assistance in providing once more the facility to host our annual get-together.

An outline of the agenda is enclosed below, and a more detailed version will be made available prior to the event. Please let us know if you expect to attend in person or are interested to participate via conference call. For further information, see: http://www.opendatafoundation.org/events/odaf_annual_meetings_2007.php

Draft Agenda for the ODaF Annual Meeting 2007
___________________________________

I. Business Report
A. Personnel Changes
B. Financial Report
II. Report on Ongoing Projects
III. Status of Resolutions from 2006
IV. Marketing Activities
A. Website
B. Position Papers
C. Newletters and Blog
D. Conferences
V. Face-to-Face Meetings
A. Report on St. Helena Meeting
B. Discussion of Next Meeting
VI. New Projects and Ideas
VII. Resolutions

A strategic ODaF meeting was held on September 13-15, 2007 at Director Bob Glushko’s St. Helena Conference Center (California, USA). The intent of the meeting was to discuss current work and brain-storm ideas for future projects.

Due to limited space, only Directors, Advisors, and Managers were invited to the meeting, along with a few presenters from outside the organization. The event was attended by participants from Adobe, the Dutch Data Archive (DANS), the Canada Research Data Centre (RDC), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Swivel, the UK Data Archive (UKDA), along with directors, advisors and managers of the Open Data Foundation.

The meeting agenda and report can be downloaded below. Note that the minutes do not capture all of the discussions which took place, but attempt to describe the course of the meeting and to list ideas and action items for follow-up. Do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions on specific topics.

• ODaF St-Helena 2007 Meeting Agenda
• ODaF St-Helena 2007 Meeting Report

ODaF wishes to express its thanks to Director Bob Glushko, who - in addition to giving us his insight as a director - made the meeting possible by giving us the use of his conference center, providing food and drink, and in all ways acting as a gracious host. Everyone was suitably impressed with the facilities and surroundings, which provided an excellent working atmosphere.

The Canada Research Data Centre Network, the Danish Data Archive, the DDI Alliance, GESIS-ZUMA, the National Opinion Research Center, the Open Data Foundation, and the United Kingdom Data Archive have agree to establish a joint program for the development of a foundation framework and a utility toolkit to support the implementation of DDI tools. The DDI Foundation Tools Program consists in a collection of coordinated projects whose products will be designed to inter-operate and implemented in accordance with standard guidelines and based on core components to be developed.

This memorandum of understanding has been established for an initial period of 2 years and is open to other organization interested in joining. The members are expected to participate in the global efforts through in cash or in kind contributions and technical support. The Open Data Foundation’s role will focus on the coordination of efforts and providing the ICT infrastructure to host the web site and the development projects.

We are pleased to announce that the Open Data Foundation is now an official member of the DDI Alliance. While we were already very active in the DDI area, this formalizes our relationship with the community.

The Alliance for the Data Documentation Initiative is an international coalition of diverse organizations that share a commitment to meeting the worldwide requirement of a publicly available standard for documenting social science data. The Alliance’s purposes are to (a) oversee the continued development of the DDI standard, including revisions, corrections, and new releases; (b) promote the adoption of the DDI social science metadata standard by data producers, data archives, data users, and software suppliers; (c) offer entry-level and advanced training in the uses of the standard for all groups of potential adopters; (d) insofar as possible, ensure compatibility of the DDI standard with emerging metadata standards in other fields; and (e) resolve the varying and sometimes conflicting interests of the diverse community that is developing and using the DDI standard.

We are pleased to announce that the UK Data Archive (UKDA) and the Open Data Foundation (ODaF) have agreed to initiate a collaborative project for the development of data archiving and conversion tools. Supported by the UKDA Data Exchange Tools (DExT) initiative, the project aims at the development of open source utilities for the conversion of quantitative data into a standard archiving format and export to common statistical packages or database systems. This initial phase is a proof of concept that will focus on using SPSS as an input format and support export to SPSS, STATA, SAS and ASCII. The archiving format will be based on a combination of fixed ASCII data and DDI metadata. Developments are expected to begin in June with product delivery scheduled for end of November 2007. This work will lay the foundation for more advanced tools that can support additional input and output formats and provide enhanced functionalities.

For further information, contact info@opendatafoundation.org
The DExT project, running at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of its Repositories and Preservation programme.
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/dext

We are pleased to announce that the Open Data Foundation is a proud sponsor of this year’s IAssist conference that will be held in Montreal, Canada from May 14th to 18th.

The program schedule has recently been released and registration is now open. We hope to see you there.

See http://www.edrs.mcgill.ca/IASSIST2007/ for further information.

The 3rd International Conference on e-Social Science will be held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 7-9, 2007

The aim of this NSF-sponsored conference on e-Social Science is to bring together international representatives of the social science and cyberinfrastructure research communities in order to create better mutual awareness, harmonize understanding, and instigate coordinated activities to accelerate research, development, and deployment of cyberinfrastructure to support the social science research community.

See http://ess.si.umich.edu for information.