News | Page 25 | Data Documentation Initiative

Upcoming DDI4 Sprints

Submitted by lyle on Wed, 2016-01-27 18:28

We are planning the next DDI4 sprint 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: https://ddi-alliance.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DDI4/Sprints.

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.

NADDI 2016 Call for Abstracts

Submitted by lyle on Wed, 2015-12-16 17:33

NADDI 2016: Document, Discover, and Interoperate (April 6-8^th, 2016)

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

http://naddiconf.org/2016/

The North American DDI (NADDI) user conference provides opportunities for all who are actively using or are interested in learning about this community-developed metadata standard for observational research data. This is a conference to come together, connect, and learn from one another. NADDI 2016 will be a three-day conference consisting of hands-on workshops (April 6) and both invited and contributed presentations (April 7 & 8). These events will be of interest to a broad community, including research and data professionals in the social and health sciences and other disciplines, and at all levels of expertise, from novice to expert.

This year’s conference theme is ‘Document, Discover, and Interoperate’.

The full power of DDI is exhibited through its applications in documenting, discovering, and interoperating data. These are activities that sustain the flow of vital information throughout a research project. Through the use of DDI, this research information is defined, identified, structured so that it can be shared predictably with other applications or be machine-actionable.

Important Dates!

Abstract submission closes - January 15, 2016
Notification of abstract acceptance - January 29, 2016
Presenter's deadline to register - March 18, 2016
Early rate registration closes - March 18, 2016
Registration deadline - March 28, 2016

Given the theme of this year’s NADDI conference, we are looking for submissions that will fit into the following four categories:

1) Repository Platforms and Metadata;

2) Metadata Production Systems;

3) Discovery Platforms;

4) Interoperability.

The hosts of this year’s NADDI conference are the Health Research Data Repository (https://uofa.ualberta.ca/nursing/research/research-supports-and-services/hrdr) and Faculty of Nursing Research Office of the University of Alberta.

For more information please visit the conference website at: http://naddiconf.org/2016/

For immediate inquiries or additional information at this time please contact the conference Chair, James Doiron (jdoiron@ualberta.ca).

EDDI Conference Held in Copenhagen

Submitted by lyle on Wed, 2015-12-16 16:11

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.

Update on EDDI 2015 Conference in Copenhagen

Submitted by vardigan on Mon, 2015-11-09 10:52

EDDI15, the 7th Annual European DDI User Conference will take place on December 2-3, 2015 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference is hosted by Statistics Denmark (DST) and DDA/National Archive of Denmark.

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international effort to create a standard to describe statistical and social science data. Documenting data with DDI facilitates interpretation and understanding -- both by humans and computers. The freely available international DDI standard describes data that result from observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. Use DDI to Document, Discover, and Interoperate!

The conference will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or using DDI is invited to attend. The program offers 30 presentations and posters, 3 tutorials, and 4 side meetings.

The keynote speeches on the first day will be delivered by Lars Thygesen (Thygesen Statistics Consulting) and Carsten Zangenberg (Statistics Denmark). On the second day the keynote speech will be held by Christian Ertmann-Christiansen (The Royal Danish Library).

The conference will open on Wednesday, Dec 2nd at 9:00 am and close on Thursday, Dec 3rd at 4:15 pm. Tutorials will take place on Tuesday, Dec 1st at 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. Two side meetings will take place on Friday, Dec 4th (the DDI Developers Meeting and the International Colectica User Conference).

The detailed program including abstracts is available at: http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/schedConf/program

The registration for participants and accommodation booking are open (regular fee up to Nov 13). Please have a look at:

http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/schedConf/registration

http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/schedConf/accommodation#Accommodation

Please note following important details:

- The regular fee will be available up to Nov 13, 2015. Late registration is still possible later.

- The reduced rates of the hotels are available on a first come, first served basis.

EDDI15 is organized jointly by DST - Statistics Denmark and the DDA - Danish Data Archive/National Archive of Denmark, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.

Jared Lyle to Serve as DDI Director

Submitted by vardigan on Tue, 2015-10-06 12:54

At its June 3 meeting in Minneapolis, the Board appointed Jared Lyle of ICPSR to serve as the next Executive Director of the Alliance, replacing Mary Vardigan, who had served in this capacity since the inception of the Alliance in 2003 and will retire this year.

Jared will take over as Director in December, bringing new strengths and skills to the role. He is an Associate Archivist and Director of Curation Services at ICPSR where he supervises the ICPSR Metadata Unit. He advocates for best practices in data management and curation in many venues and is an instructor in the ICPSR Summer Program course “Curating and Managing Research Data for Reuse.”

He has a Master's degree from the University of Michigan's School of Information and has been active in facilitating partnerships between domain repositories and institutional repositories. He also coordinates activities of the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS), a voluntary partnership of organizations created to archive, catalog, and preserve data used for social science research.

Four New Members Elected to DDI Alliance Executive Board

Submitted by vardigan on Tue, 2015-10-06 12:52

The June 2015 election resulted in four new members joining the DDI Executive Board:

Bill Block, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) – 2015-2019
Louise Corti, United Kingdom Data Archive (UKDA) – 2015-2019
David Schiller, Research Data Centre of the German Federal Employment Agency, Institute for Employment Research (IAB) – 2015-2017, completing the term of Gillian Nicoll
Joachim Wackerow, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences – 2015-2019

Continuing members include:

Steve McEachern, Australian Data Archive (ADA) – 2013-2017
Leanne Trimble, University of Toronto, Scholars Portal – 2013-2017
George Alter, representing ICPSR, the Alliance Host Institution

Sincere thanks are owed to the outgoing Board members -- Mari Kleemola, Ron Nakao, Gillian Nicoll, and Anita Rocha -- for their excellent service and dedication. They accomplished a great deal during a short time and had a huge impact on professionalizing the organization.

Metadata Workshop to be Held at Schloss Dagstuhl in October

Submitted by vardigan on Tue, 2015-10-06 12:49

A metadata workshop will be held at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany, on October 19-23, 2015, in connection with a working meeting of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). The workshop will bring together representatives from several metadata standards to provide an external review of current DDI work, with an emphasis on the model-driven approach, the production framework, and the substantive content of the standard. Progress made so far will be examined in light of the high-level goals and design principles for the model-driven DDI specification, sometimes called DDI4 or the Moving Forward project. This meeting is part of a Dagstuhl workshop series on DDI Moving Forward that began in 2012.

It is anticipated that the other standards will in turn provide information about their development procedures and goals so that we can learn from each other, communicate more effectively across disciplines, and potentially interoperate. Concurrent with the metadata workshop, a "sprint" will take place to advance the development of the new DDI model.

EDDI 2015 Registration Opens

Submitted by vardigan on Tue, 2015-09-29 07:30

Registration is now open for EDDI15, the 7th Annual European DDI User Conference, and the draft program is available.

EDDI15 will take place on December 2-3, 2015 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The conference is hosted by Statistics Denmark (DST) and DDA/National Archive of Denmark. The conference will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or using DDI is invited to attend. The program offers 30 presentations and posters, 3 tutorials, and 3 side meetings.

The detailed draft program including abstracts is available at: http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/schedConf/program

The registration for participants and accommodation booking are open. Please have a look at:

http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/schedConf/registration

http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/eddi15/schedConf/accommodation#Accommodation

Please note following important details:

- The early bird fee will be available up to Oct 23, 2015.

- The reduced rates of the hotels are available on a first come, first served basis.

http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/eddi15

DDI Training Opportunity Offered

Submitted by vardigan on Fri, 2015-05-29 12:02

For the past eight years, GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences has organized intensive five-day DDI training workshops at Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern, Germany. (Dagstuhl is a computer science research center that focuses mainly on a highly acknowledged seminar series.) This year’s training workshop will take place on October 12-16, 2015.

Joachim Wackerow (GESIS) leads the training workshop along with co-trainers Arofan Gregory (Metadata Technology) and Wendy Thomas (Minnesota Population Center). To plan for the workshop, Arofan and Wendy spend the week before the workshop in Mannheim (one of the two GESIS locations) where the three trainers prepare the syllabus and the schedule for the upcoming workshop. This has worked well and has been a successful model.

In an effort to diversify and supplement the pool of qualified DDI trainers and to start to build the next generation of instructors, this year GESIS together with the Dagstuhl trainers is offering a "train the trainer" opportunity, funded by the DDI Alliance. This will enable a new trainer to attend the preparation week in Mannheim and the workshop at Dagstuhl. The goal is that this person could then conduct similar training in the future either alone or with others.

The Alliance will fund the cost of the new trainer's travel, accommodation, and food for two weeks, and will provide a stipend of Euro 1000.

We are looking for a highly motivated individual who has an interest in DDI and in training others in its use. This person will need to be available for the full two weeks (Week 1 in Mannheim, October 5-9, and Week 2 at Dagstuhl).

To apply for this opportunity, please send a letter of interest, a resume or set of qualifications, and a vision for future DDI training to the DDI Alliance Director by June 21, 2015. The trainers - in consultation with the DDI Alliance Director - will select a person for the position and he or she will be informed by July 7.

DDI Lifecycle Training to be Held at Dagstuhl in October

Submitted by vardigan on Fri, 2015-05-29 11:34

Facilitating Process and Metadata-Driven Automation in the Social, Economic, and Behavioural Sciences with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)

October 12-16, 2015

Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics, Wadern, Germany

Course Instructors:

Arofan Gregory (ODaF - Open Data Foundation, Tucson, Arizona, USA)

Wendy L. Thomas (MPC - Minnesota Population Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)

Joachim Wackerow (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany)

Description of the workshop

This training workshop will provide an introduction to using the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard to enable many of the processes common to the social, behavioural, and economic sciences, from the conceptualization of surveys through data collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination. The focus of the workshop will be on the “Lifecycle” branch of DDI, version 3.2, which provides a detailed model of the metadata needed to support both human-driven and automated processing. The workshop will be organized in a task-oriented manner, with participants actively documenting real-world use cases in order to learn how best to employ the DDI model and associated technology. The use cases produced can be published as the final output of the workshop, as a resource to the broader DDI community. Participants are encouraged to bring their own organizational use cases.

The workshop is aimed at data producers, managers, and users who are not already experts in the DDI, or who wish to become more familiar with the latest version of the standard (version 3.2). There will also be information provided about DDI RDF Vocabularies and the envisioned shift in future versions of DDI Lifecycle to a model-based approach – the style of modeling and some of the standard implementation syntaxes (RDF and XML) will be covered. The workshop will include hands-on exercises and work within break-out groups on specific use cases, but will be accessible to participants with all levels of technical expertise.

Please have a look at the workshop page for further details, practical information, and registration:
http://tinyurl.com/DDI-Workshop