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Developing Products of the Alliance

Developing New DDI Products

The DDI Alliance continues to develop new products to meet the needs of current and potential user group. These are proposed by members and supported by contributed work and funding from the Alliance as agreed to by the Executive Board. New products may be used to expand the coverage of existing DDI products or be published as stand-alone products that address a need in the DDI Community.

Development of a number of RDF Vocabularies as well as an expansion of the role of RDF in DDI products began in a workshop on "Semantic Statistics for Social, Behavioural, and Economic Sciences: Leveraging the DDI Model for the Linked Data Web" at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics, Germany, in September 2011. This work continued with follow-up workshops and focused product meetings.

A major development effort starting in 2013, entitled the "Moving Forward Project," resulted in new content and production approaches in existing products as well as new product development.

Currently Under Development

Disco - DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary focusing on objects in DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle that support the discovery of variables, questions, and studies in RDF based search systems.
DDI-CDI : DDI - Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) is intended to fill the emerging need for integration of data from different disciplinary domains. It is designed to connect disparate forms of data and metadata, whether they are described in DDI Codebook/Lifecycle or in any other fashion.

View current DDI products.

Product Description Supports Activities Points of Contact with other DDI Products Available metadata syntax representations
Disco This specification is designed to support the discovery of microdata sets and related metadata using RDF technologies in the Web of Linked Data. The vocabulary leverages the DDI specification to create a simplified version of this model for the discovery of data files. It is based on a subset of the DDI XML formats of DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle.
  • Programmatically identifying relevant datasets for a specific research purpose. Descriptive documentation of the content, meaning, provenance, and access for a single data set
  • Transform DDI XML instances into RDF format to expose in them to the Web of Linked Data
  • Provide a basic description of datasets in RDF
  • DDI-Lifecycle: Disco is based on a sub-set of DDI-Lifecycle objects
  • DDI-Codebook: Disco is based on a sub-set of DDI-Codebook objects
  • RDF/OWL
DDI-CDI The new DDI - Cross Domain Integration (DDI - CDI) is an application of the model which emerged from many years of work on a "next generation" DDI specification. It is designed to be a model which can be used to connect disparate forms of data with each other, whether they are described in DDI- Codebook/DDI-Lifecycle or in any other fashion. As such, it can be used as a way of integrating these new forms of data with more traditional, existing data, or with each other. the specifications must be able to describe new forms of data, to be implemented in a wider range of technologies. Ultimately, the diverse types of data must be seen as an integrated whole, complete with a description of the structure, meaning, and provenance of each part. DDI-CDI is intended to meet this need.
  • Describing data in rectangular (wide), long (event), multi-dimensional (cube), and no-SQL (big data) data formats
  • Describing process as a primary aspect of data provenance.
  • Describing variables, classifications, and other concepts and representations
  • Detailed descriptions of described data coming from multiple sources.
  • Describe the variety of ways a data set might be organized and the provenance of that data, independent of the subject field or the technology platform used.
  • DDI-Lifecycle: Provided a tested model for documenting much of what is needed.
  • DDI-Codebook: Provided a tested model for documenting much of what is needed.
  • XML Schema
  • UML/Canonical XMI