News

Research data management has become an important global issue as funding agencies, publishers, and disciplines increasingly require the sharing of publicly funded data.  The Open Data movement treats curated data as a valuable resource available to support new research with the potential for new discoveries. Furthermore, the expectation that research findings can be replicated is pressuring researchers to make their data understandable and useable by others. Both the replication and reuse of research data is highly dependent on properly documented data. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) provides two structured metadata specifications for describing the content and context of data about individuals or organizations (microdata) in the health, social, and behavioral sciences. This community-maintained standard for microdata is internationally recognized as a best practice in preparing, sharing, and preserving data.

Interested in learning more? Please join us in Madison for the third North American DDI (NADDI) Users Conference, to be held April 8-10, 2015. Organized by the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the meeting will take place at the Pyle Center on the UW campus in beautiful downtown Madison, with the theme "Enhancing Discoverability with Open Metadata Standards."

The Keynote Speaker for the conference is Dr. Tito Castillo. Dr. Castillo is an independent consultant who has worked in the field of biomedical computing for over 25 years. More recently, he established the epiLab secure computing environment at University College London Institute of Child Health and began to apply DDI to a variety of epidemiological studies. In August 2014 he founded Xperimint Ltd, a specialist data management company for biomedical data management.

The conference will feature training sessions on Wednesday, April 8, with opening reception the evening of April 9. Wednesday’s training will cover an introduction to DDI in the morning and the afternoon will focus on the practical packaging of statistical datasets and metadata. Conference sessions focus on a wide range of innovative topics and projects.

We hope to see you there!

A dedicated task-force of the SDMX Technical Working Group (TWG) submits the new specification of a Validation and Transformation Language (VTL) for public review. The review period extends until 8th November 2014 in order to allow time for consolidation of a final version at the end of 2014. Feedback is welcome.

At the end of 2012, the SDMX Secretariat requested the TWG to start a new work package on “Expressions and Calculations” aimed at allowing the definition and the exchange of validation and transformation rules, based on the generic framework for defining mathematical expressions already existing in the SDMX information model. To make such framework fully operational, a standard language for defining validation and transformation rules (set of operators, their syntax and semantics) should be adopted, while appropriate IT formats for exchanging such rules – and web services to store and retrieve them – should be designed.

The intention is to provide a language which is usable by statisticians to express logical validation rules and transformations on data, whether described as a dimensional table or as unit-record data. Although a work-product of SDMX, the VTL language is based on the GSIM data model and should be usable with other standards as well. The present draft for public review also provides (in its part 1) a formal description of data validation at business level against which information models can be mapped.

VTL – part 1: Validation and Transformation Language (General Description)

VTL – part 2: Validation and Transformation Language (Library of Operators)

Please send your comments to the SDMX Technical Working Group (SDMX-TWG) at twg@sdmx.org. Each email message should contain only a limited set of numbered – and possibly homogeneous – comments and should contain the elements indicated in the attached comment log.

Submission Deadline:     September 7, 2014
Place:                              London, United Kingdom
Date:                               December 2 - 3, 2014
Host:                                IOE - Institute of Education, University of London
Conference web page:    http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/eddi14

EDDI14 is organized jointly by the IOE - Institute of Education, University of London, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.

The meeting 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 and present.

Call for Papers

We are seeking presentations, talks, papers, posters on all things DDI:

• Case Studies
• Mature implementations
• Early Implementations
• Interplay of DDI with other standards or technologies
• Projects in early phases in which DDI is under consideration
• Critiques of DDI

We strongly encourage papers in different areas to ensure that a broad balance of topics is covered which will attract the greatest breadth of participants, and we encourage conference participants to propose presentations, papers, and posters that would be of interest to themselves and other attendees.

The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to:

• Infrastructure for Data Collection, Research, and Archiving
• Reusing and Sharing Metadata
• Official Statistics
• Open Data and Linked Open Data
• Privacy and Access Control
• Data Harmonization
• Incentives to Document Data
• Metadata versus Data and Related Ethics
• Software / Tools

Submission

Proposals are welcome for:

• Regular presentations
• Short presentations
• Full papers
• Plenary presentations
• Complete sessions
• Tutorials and workshops
• Posters and software demonstrations

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, please use the online submission system of the conference. The deadline for submissions is September 7, 2014. Please have a look at the Call for Paper page for further details. Please consider to indicate the availability as reviewer as well.

General Information

For more information about the conference, see the conference web site at http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/eddi14.

For questions or any other correspondence regarding EDDI14, please send an email to eddi14@googlegroups.com.

Last year’s presentations and posters are available at the EDDI13 website, full papers at a web page of the DDI Alliance Working Paper Series.

For more information about the EDDI conference series and details on the previous EDDI conferences, look at http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/.

Kind regards,
Joachim Wackerow on behalf of the EDDI14 program committee

The DDI Alliance will hold its Annual Meeting of Members in Toronto on Monday, June 2, 2014, in advance of the annual IASSIST Conference. The IASSIST program will feature several sessions related to DDI.