DDI members are voting from December 8-22 to elect seven members to the reorganized DDI Scientific Board. The Scientific Board is the scientific and technical body of the DDI Alliance and represents the Scientific Community. The Scientific Board proposes the scientific work plan to the membership for approval and facilitates the scientific and technical work activities. More details about the Scientific Board are found in the DDI Bylaws. More details about the nomination process are found in this November announcement.
Biosketches and position statements of the Scientific Board candidates are listed below in alphabetical order. The election will be decided on the basis of those candidates getting the most votes. If a tie vote occurs, a second round of voting will take place.
For this initial election, member terms will start on January 1, 2021. The newly elected Scientific Board will select which three of the initial members will serve for two years (ending June 2023) and which four will serve for four years (ending June 2025).
The Scientific Board candidates include:
Ingo Barkow
Biosketch
Ingo Barkow has been working at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons since 2015, first as a lecturer for data management, since 2017 as a professor and since 2019 as the head of the Swiss Institute for Information Science. Prior to that, he was Data Manager at the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) in Frankfurt, where he held technical management positions in the Research Data Center (FDZ) and the Center for Technology-based Assessment (TBA). He is involved in the DDI Alliance for more than 10 years and currently serves as Vice Chair of the Scientific Board.
Position Statement
As former Chair of the temporary working group which discussed and proposed the new structure of the Scientific Board I would like to volunteer to put these changes into practice. We left the processes open so the newly elected board will be able to define its internal proceedings, but it might be helpful to have somebody who served in the former Scientific Board as well as in the working group who can explain the original ideas behind this new setup. My further goals are to harmonize processes between the different products of the DDI Alliance and to build closer connections between the new Scientific Board and the different working groups.
Darren Bell
Biosketch
Darren Bell has worked at UKDA for nine years, firstly as a data modeler/developer and latterly as Director of Technical Services since the beginning of 2020. Prior to that, he worked in a variety of roles in both global infrastructure and development in both the public and commercial sectors. His particular technical interests are in linked data, cloud platforms and semantic web. His experience with DDI extends back to 2.1 and 3.1 and more recently, experimenting with DDI4 to model big data on property graphs and playing a key role in DDI advancements at CESSDA.
Position Statement
Over the last decade I believe that the DDI community has focused on building elegant and sophisticated models, but sometimes at the cost of a grounded sense of how these can be operationalized in the real world. The fact remains that Codebook is still used by the majority. I hope I can bring some operational common sense and an ability to strike a balance between theory and practice to the Committee. By augmenting the more esoteric modelling activities with a clear, integrated operational and training roadmap for DDI, we can accelerate adoption of Lifecycle and CDI.
Christophe Dzikowski
Biosketch
Christophe Dzikowski holds a master's degree in public statistics methodologies and has 8 years of experience as a statistician at INSEE. He has been a survey methodologist and has led sampling, weighting, imputation and questionnaire design operations. He has also held a position in the design and development of applications, based on both administrative and survey data, enabling survey managers to obtain outputs automatically. Currently, he works in the quality unit on international standards and metadata, participates in the unece working groups, is administrator of the colectica suite used at insee and is involved in the work on active metadata.
Position Statement
As a Board member, Insee would facilitate the liaison with Official Statistics, help collect statistical needs and promote DDI in statistical organizations. Insee's experience as a DDI practitioner will be useful for defining the evolutions of the DDI products. Insee has also a valuable knowledge in using DDI in articulation with other standards, for example ModernStats models or RDF vacabularies, and in implementing DDI as active metadata in operational processes. Insee intends to leverage this background to actively contribute to the Board activities, with the aim of producing useful and concrete outcomes for the community.
Dan Gillman
Biosketch
Dan Gillman works for the Office of Survey Methods Research at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. My research interests include standards, metadata, terminology, and classification. This includes 30 years’ experience developing standards, including in the DDI, UNECE, ISO, W3C, OMG, SDMX, and US federal government communities. My work with DDI dates back to 1995. I am a long time member of the TC and co-chaired the Survey Design and Implementation subgroup that developed the methodological sections (sampling, questionnaire, weighting) of DDI 3.3. Efforts over the past 10 years include XKOS and the new DDI-CDI.
Position Statement
Supplementing survey data with administrative or other data, the US Evidence Based Policy Making Act (2019), AI and machine learning, and transparency and reproducibility result in the need for standards that address discovery, understanding, usage, interoperability, and integration of data. DDI standards are positioned to supplement these problems. But, the need for improving DDI standards continues, including reviewing current practice, incorporating new areas in statistics, conforming to other standards, linking business requirements to data, improving provenance information, and addressing the many areas where statistical data can be combined with other data. My business and research interests coincide with these needs.
Simon Hodson
Biosketch
Simon Hodson has been Executive Director of CODATA since August 2013. Simon is an expert on data policy issues and research data management. He has contributed to influential reports on Current Best Practice for Research Data Management Policies and to the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World. He chaired the European Commission’s Expert Group on FAIR Data which produced the report Turning FAIR into Reality. Simon is currently vice-chair of the UNESCO Open Science Advisory Committee, tasked with drafting the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which is intended for adoption in November 2021.
Position Statement
CODATA has been mandated by the International Science Council, in the latter’s Action Plan, to develop and implement a global programme ‘Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges’ (including SDGs and other components of the 2030 agenda). The programme aims to assist cross-domain research by facilitating the integration of data from diverse sources. This preparatory work has led to close collaboration with members of the DDI community and the MRT Group around DDI-CDI. If elected to the Scientific Board, I would seek to strengthen that cooperation and advance the contribution of DDI to supporting research into global grand challenges.
Larry Hoyle
Biosketch
Larry Hoyle is a Senior Scientist (Emeritus - January 1, 2021) at the Institute for Policy and Social Research, University of Kansas. He has been active with DDI since 2005, participating in many Dagstuhl workshops and DDI sprints. He has authored a number of DDI related papers and presentations, including for SAS, IASSIST, EDDI, and NADDI conferences. He wrote the Sloan Foundation seed grant for NADDI and with Mary Vardigan wrote an NSF grant to fund adding enhanced citation capabilities to DDI4 (DDI-CDI). He is currently working with Joachim Wackerow to create an R package for the whole DDI-CDI model.
Position Statement
I have a strong interest in the effort to broaden the capabilities of DDI to describe data and its context from a wider range of disciplines. I think this is crucial for the long-term viability of DDI. Multi-disciplinary research is becoming increasingly common and there is a need for standards that cross domains. It was disheartening at the Dagstuhl Interoperability of Metadata Standards workshop in 2018 to see non social science participants view DDI as having a rather limited applicability. The recent collaboration with CoData is helping to change this view.
Trisha Kunst Martinez
Biosketch
Trisha Kunst Martinez, ICPSR Director of Computing and Network Services, is a Product Management and IT leader with 20 plus years of award-winning experience in digital marketing, product management and strategy focused on creating platforms to scale memorable customer experiences.
Position Statement
I want to understand adoption of DDI to determine high usage needs of users. I would focus on how interoperable DDI is with other widely adopted schema standards (such as schema.org). I would lead DDI to become more interoperable with other widely adopted schema standards, such as standards for medical and genetic records, whenever possible.
Hilde Orten
Biosketch
Hilde Orten is a sociologist, working as a Special Adviser at NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data with focus on metadata related tasks. She started her work at NSD as a member of the first European Social Survey archive team, where she developed systems for cross-national data management. Later her focus moved from comparative surveys to metadata. At NSD she has been engaged in survey tools development, based on DDI-Lifecycle. Hilde is active in the work of the DDI Alliance as a member of the group that develops the DDI-Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) specification, as well as controlled vocabularies development and DDI training. Hilde was a member of the DDI Scientific Board restructuring temporary working group.
Position Statement
I will work for an active collaboration between the Scientific Board, the Scientific Community and the working groups of the DDI Alliance, with a goal to achieve consolidation between the ongoing tasks and progress in the work. I see collaborative online training and discussion workshops on specific topics as a means to move forward with this. This will require support and empowerment of the training group and its activities. To meet the challenges a changing data world brings to metadata standards development, I view collaboration with people from a variety of research domains and other standards as vital.
Flavio Rizzolo
Biosketch
Flavio Rizzolo is a computer science and data professional at Statistics Canada with extensive experience in interoperability, architecture and standards. Over the past 10 years he has worked in complex data projects, R&D initiatives and international collaborations and has been actively engaged in the development of international standards, models, and architectures, e.g. UNECE ModernStats (GSIM, CSPA, CSDA, COOS), DDI 4 and DDI-CDI. He is currently, co-chair of UNECE GSIM and GSBPM teams, member of intergovernmental working groups and the DDI Technical Committee, and a participant of the CODATA Decadal Programme. He received a MSc. and a PhD from the University of Toronto.
Position Statement
We would like to take the DDI products to the next level to support interoperability in complex data platforms and production environments as part of a rich ecosystem of standards. We envision DDI products, especially Lifecycle, CDI, XKOS and SDTL, becoming the go-to standard suite to enable the next generation of metadata-driven solutions across data capture, processing and analysis, which is a fundamental part of the modernization efforts being carried out at Statistics Canada and other NSO’s. We believe Flavio will bring a unique set of skills and experience to the table that can help keeping DDI moving in that direction.
Nicolas Sauger
Biosketch
Nicolas Sauger is Professor of Methods and Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris (France). He is the Director of the Center for Socio Political Data, which participates in the French Archive network for Social Science Data Progedo, itself a member of the European infrastructure CESSDA. Sauger is a specialist of comparative large-scale surveys (ESS, CSES, NES) and experimental methods. He has published about 80 papers about data collection design, elections and institutions. Sauger has been a member of the DDI Scientific Board Restructuring Group and has contributed to the organization of the EDDI Conference in 2020 and 2021.
Position Statement
Running for possibly becoming a member of the DDI Scientific board reflects my wish to positively contribute to the developments of DDI in the years to come. So far, the bulk of my experience has consisted in data production and dissemination in the field of political science with a keen interest in interdisciplinary endeavors. What I might bring to DDI is my experiences of different usages of metadata standards as a researcher, as a data producer but also as a data archive officer. I have also substantial experience in sitting in various international scientific boards. I am convinced that diversity is key to the strategic development of DDI. I hope to be in position to contribute to going in this direction.
Carsten Thiel
Biosketch
Carsten Thiel is Chief Technical Officer at CESSDA, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium. He is responsible for all technological aspects of the CESSDA infrastructure and its services. Prior to working at CESSDA, he was Technology Coordinator and Co-Manager for the DARIAH-DE research project at the University of Göttingen. He is also involved in many European infrastructure cooperations. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Magdeburg, where he worked as a teaching assistant. His research interests include digital research infrastructures, distributed development processes and the DevOps approach to infrastructure management.
Position Statement
DDI is crucial for data exchange between CESSDA Service Providers. However, standard compliance is a core challenge for CESSDA, which brings together a heterogeneous and multilingual body of national data archives from over 20 countries. CESSDA has worked on harmonising and aligning the use of different DDI standards across its bodies and services for many years. Although Carsten is not a metadata expert or practitioner, he can contribute to the advancement of DDI from his perspective, working at the intersection of these endeavours at CESSDA Main Office.
Joachim Wackerow
Biosketch
Joachim Wackerow is a metadata expert at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany. He has been involved in the development of DDI Lifecycle since 2004 and was vice chair of the Technical Committee from 2007 to 2016. He is the main inventor of the annual DDI training and workshop series at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany, and has been a co-organizer of these events since 2007. He is a co-initiator of the European DDI User Conference (EDDI), chaired from 2010 to 2018. He is a member of the core group driving the DDI Moving Forward Project, from which DDI-CDI recently emerged. From 2016 to 2020, he served as chair of the Scientific Board.
Position Statement
My focus is on enabling an active DDI Alliance through a better division of responsibilities between the Executive Board, the Scientific Board and the Working Groups, as set out in the bylaws. With this in mind, a key issue would be the creation of a scientific work plan to improve the (combined) use of the DDI specifications, including a reusable training library for all DDI versions. I am convinced that the DDI Alliance, as a small domain-specific organization, needs to invest in modern specification technologies and collaborate with other organizations to play a role in an emerging global research data infrastructure.
Knut Wenzig
Biosketch
Since 2014, Knut Wenzig has been working as a social scientist for the SOEP (Socio-Economic Panel at DIW Berlin) in the areas of documentation and data management. His metadata activities started in 2010 at a Research Data Center. Here he came in contact with the DDI community and since 2015 he is a member of EDDI’s program committee. For the next 4 years he is responsible for the project “Open, metadata enriched, non-proprietary data format for data dissemination” within the German National Research Data Infrastructure. Here is his chapter on metadata (“Metadaten”) in a handbook: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-21308-4_92.
Position Statement
A broader application of DDI standards will help to keep the promises of the FAIR movement. The availability of data and metadata complying to DDI Standards and the availability of software tools and services that can produce and process this information are mutually dependent. I want to look at the published DDI metadata and report on how DDI is used (inspired by lod-cloud.net) to inform further development. Publishing is one of the pillars of science. I want to make suggestions to provide the community with information about relevant publications and support writing e.g. by establishing a publication award.
