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Working Groups and committees advise the Executive Board or the Scientific Board on relevant topics and activities related to the operation, development and future of the Alliance and its specifications and semantic products. Anyone affiliated with a member organization with relevant knowledge and expertise on the given subject may apply to join a working group. Each group must have a designated leader for managing the work and reporting to its authorizing body.

If you would like to propose a new working group, please send an email to the Chair of the Executive Board or the Chair of the Scientific Board. The DDI Alliance makes modest funding available for Working Group members to attend key meetings focused on development of the specification.

All working groups' documentation, including past and inactive groups, is maintained on the DDI Collaboration Wiki

To JOIN a working group, send an email to the chair of that group via the links below.


Controlled Vocabularies Working Group

Link to the Controlled Vocabularies Working Group Wiki Page

Join the Controlled Vocabularies Working Group

This group develops controlled vocabularies on already identified DDI elements and determines which other DDI elements require controlled vocabularies and develops those.


Cross Domain Integration (CDI) Working Group

Link to the CDI Working Group Wiki Page

Join the CDI Working Group

The CDI working group focuses on the iterative lifecycle of modeling, representation, and testing of DDI - Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI), which is a developing product of the DDI Alliance intended to fill the emerging need for integration of data from different disciplinary domains. DDI-CDI is designed to connect disparate forms of data and metadata, whether they are described in DDI Codebook/Lifecycle or in any other fashion.


DDI Developers Community

This is an informal google group for developers of software implementations based on DDI. The group gets together periodically to discuss their implementations of the DDI specification. 

Join the DDI Developers Google Group

Minutes of Developers Group meetings

Group Report, 2010-2011
Group Report, 2011-2012
Group Report, 2012-2013


Glossary Working Group

Link to the Glossary Working Group Wiki Page

Join the Glossary Working Group

The Glossary Working Group produces, maintains, and updates the DDI Glossary of terms. The DDI Glossary is a resource that users may consult for gaining a better understanding of DDI products.


Marketing Working Group

<pLink to the Marketing Working Group Wiki Page

Join the Marketing Working Group

This group promotes, facilitates, and accelerates the widespread adoption of DDI standards through understanding the different audiences and tailoring messages to those audiences. Key responsibilities of the group include:

  • Identify key audiences within the data communities that can benefit from DDI adoption.
  • Identify the barriers hindering DDI adoption for these audiences and communicate them with relevant DDI communities.
  • Prioritize audiences based on their potential impact and readiness for DDI implementation.
  • Develop concrete use cases to make it easy for the different audiences to adopt DDI.
  • Develop easy-to-understand materials that effectively communicate the strengths and advantages of DDI products.
  • Create compelling marketing campaigns to raise awareness, liaising with DDI Working groups and committees through webinars, workshops, conferences, and working papers and articles.

Paradata Working Group

Join the Paradata Working Group

The Paradata Working Group is reviewing elements of paradata (data about the process by which survey data were collected) that should be incorporated into the DDI specification.


Questions and Questionnaires Working Group

Link to the Questions and Questionnaires Working Group Wiki Page

Join the Questions and Questionnaires Working Group

The Questions and Questionnaires Working Group's main objective is to provide guidelines for building and managing questions and questionnaires using different DDI products and related standards. The group will also work with other expert groups to help identify needs for new material (e.g. training material) or evolution of the standards.


RDF Equivalence Working Group

Join the RDF Equivalence Working Group

The RDF Equivalence Working Group is creating a mapping of the most used common classes across the DDI products, defined using the owl equivalentClass.The current plan is to record these mappings using the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM). SSSOM will provide a standard framework for recording the equivalences and provides tooling to generate the OWL reified axioms. The working group may expand to include OWL equivalentProperty mappings if it is found to be useful.


Structured Data Transformation Language (SDTL) Working Group

<pLink to the SDTL Working Group Wiki Page

Join the SDTL Working Group

The SDTL Working Group maintains and manages the Structured Data Transformation Language (SDTL), an independent intermediate language for representing data transformation commands. In 2020, the DDI Alliance membership approved SDTL as an addition to the DDI product suite.


Technical Committee

Link to the Technical Committee Wiki Page

Join the Technical Committee

The Scientific Board maintains a standing Technical Committee whose purpose is to model, render, maintain, and update the DDI specifications to meet community needs and align with Alliance strategic goals. The Technical Committee receives input from substantive working groups of the Scientific Board, DDI users and developers, and other interested parties.


Training Working Group

Link to the Training Working Group Wiki Page

Join the Training Working Group

The mission of the Training Group is to:

  • Introduce people to DDI and improve people's competence in working with DDI
  • Gear training to specific audiences
  • Develop expertise within the community for training purposes
  • Maintain a training library with updated training material for reuse

XKOS - Extended Knowledge Organization System Working Group

Link to the XKOS Working Group Wiki Page

Join the XKOS Working Group

XKOS leverages the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) for managing statistical classifications and concept management systems, since SKOS is widely used.

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