News

This webinar, held on 26 September 2024, looked at the changing data landscape, and how it is and will continue to impact the development of standards in the world of official statistics. The advent of large language models and associated AI approaches, combined with the increasing demand for and use of a wider range of data for both research and policy purposes — the driver behind the FAIR data principles — alters the way standards are used to support data systems in official statistics. This webinar looked at these drivers for change, and the recent and upcoming developments around DDI, SDMX, and a range of other standards from WorldFAIR, W3C, and the UN/ECE Modernisation of Statistics community. Further, it suggested some further avenues of exploration and work.

1. Introduction (Arofan Gregory, Chair, DDI-CDI Working Group)
2. Trends in the Data Landscape (Mercè Crosas, Head of Computational Social Sciences, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and President, CODATA). 
3. Standards and Approaches (Arofan Gregory, Chair, DDI-CDI Working Group). 
4. Interoperability with SDMX, DDI and other OS standards (Flavio Rizzolo, Senior Data Architect, Statistics Canada). 
5. Example: UN SDG Indicators Example: DDI-CDI from SDMX Services for Google Data Commons (Luis Gerardo Gonzalez Morales, Chief of the Data Innovation Section. UN Statistics Division). 

The recording and slides are now available: https://codata.org/the-impact-of-fair-and-ai-on-standards-in-official-statistics-webinar-thursday-26-september/

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the 16^th European DDI Users Conference, to be held at the heart of the Alps in Chur, Switzerland from 2-6 December 2024. The conference is being generously hosted by the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons.

Details of how to register are at: https://events.geant.org/event/1637/page/17-registration

There will be 2 workshops/tutorials on the Monday followed by ~40 presentations, several posters and tow birds-of-a-feather discsussions on the Tuesday/Wednesday from a wide range of organisations and individuals on all things DDI, and related issues.

Side meetings will take place on Monday and Thursday.

The DDI Alliance Developers Group Hackathon will be on Thursday and Friday (separate registration needed).

The draft program is available at: https://events.geant.org/event/1637/timetable/#20241202.detailed

Details of getting to the venue and accommodation are available at: https://events.geant.org/event/1637/page/14-travel-accommodation

We look forward to welcoming you to Chur!

Mari Kleemola & Jon Johnson

EDDI 2023 co-chairs

Dear DDI Alliance community,

Today, the Technical Committee received Version 1.0 of DDI Cross-Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) from the DDI-CDI working group. Over the coming weeks, the Technical Committee will review the package for completeness and prepare it for a formal vote on publication. Once preparations are complete, Designated Member Representatives from DDI Alliance Full Members will receive a link to cast their votes. It is important to vote. 

An initial public review was conducted from June to December 2022, with the issue tracker remaining open for comments through 2023. During this time, the working group actively addressed all submitted issues.  The next candidate review was submitted to the Technical Committee in April 2024, but no full public review was requested, as changes were limited to minor refinements and documentation updates. An additional technical review of the production process took place from May 1 to August 16, 2024. All issues have been addressed and the product is ready for a final vote on publication.

To assist you in evaluating this product for inclusion in the DDI suite, we invite you to attend a one-hour webinar, which will cover key DDI-CDI features, its relationship with DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle, and early implementation cases within the DDI and FAIR communities.  

Webinar Details:

• Date: Thursday, October 3, 2024 

• Time: 10:00 EDT / 16:00 CEST / 14:00 UTC 

• Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYscOmgqjgpGdGMseAIXsoA6M1CRdL_p9hj

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information on how to join the webinar.

For additional background information on DDI-CDI, please visit: https://ddialliance.org/Specification/ddi-cdi.

DDI-CDI is a new product for DDI and we are asking you to vote on its inclusion in the product line of the DDI Alliance. DDI-CDI extends traditional DDI metadata to describe data beyond the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) domains, addressing the need for broader capabilities. It supports descriptions of event and sensor data ("long" data), key-value data (often associated with "big" data and no-SQL data), and multi-dimensional data. By integrating these with traditional "wide" (or "rectangular") DDI data descriptions, DDI-CDI enables the management and production of integrated data sets from diverse sources. As cross-domain and multi-disciplinary research grows, this capability becomes increasingly vital. 

Additionally, DDI-CDI facilitates the documentation of generic processes, allowing for clear descriptions of the steps involved in data integration. To ensure compatibility with varying technologies and standards used across domains, DDI-CDI is designed to interoperate with a wide range of web standards, supporting both XML or RDF-based syntax representations. 

We would like to thank Arofan Gregory, the DDI-CDI Working Group, and the Technical Committee for their dedicated efforts in preparing the DDI-CDI product for publication.

Jared Lyle
Executive Director, DDI Alliance
ICPSR, University of Michigan
lyle@umich.edu