This year was a significant milestone for EDDI: fifteen continuous annual conferences which have bounced around northern Europe and the Scandinavian countries finally alighting in Central Europe.
We are very grateful to the Slovenian Social Science Data Archive (ADP) for hosting another successful EDDI in the beautiful (and mostly dry) city of Ljubljana. The conference was attended by 110 delegates (75 in person). EDDI moves from city to city, not just because it gives the opportunity for cultural enlightenment, but because proximity encourages participation in the surrounding region. This year nearly 20% of participants came from Central Europe and from a number of countries which had not previously attended.
EDDIs have been an important part of building the DDI community, thus far they have been attended by 800 individuals, 35% have been to more than one EDDI and this year, as has been the case for almost every conference, 40-50% were first time attendees.
Organizing EDDI is a never ending treadmill. The Program Committee meets every two weeks for most the year and we would like to thank them for their continuing contributions and advice which made this year in particular so successful.
The program included 37 presentations and 3 posters, and several pre- and post-meetings. Keynote addresses were given by Miro Pušnik, University of Ljubljana (“Open Access roadmaps in Slovenia: Slovenia's efforts to align with the open science policies in the European Research Area”) and Milan Ojsteršek, University of Maribor (“How to ensure semantic interoperability between FAIR digital objects”). A DDI Alliance Plenary discussed the future of DDI in the metadata landscape. The conference sessions described challenges and also proposed solutions on a variety of topics including implementation of DDI standards, variable cascades, FAIR, EOSC, DDI tools, controlled vocabularies, longitudinal data management, and interoperability.
The pre-conference workshop on “Metadata Uplift and Machine Learning - European Perspectives” was well attended and plans were made for coordinating activities. The training session “Applying the DDI Specifications to Organisational Challenges: An Introduction to the Standards” introduced the different DDI specifications, and explained the uses to which standard, machine-actionable metadata and associated tools can be put.
Side meetings were also held, one for the DDI Training Group to discuss future plans, and the second where the DDI Technical Committee concentrated on getting a new version of DDI-LIfecycle ready for review for early 2024 and discussed the infrastructure needed to support future automation of product development.
The presentations are available on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/eddi2023 .
Save the date for the next EDDI! EDDI2024, the Call of the Data Mountains, will take place in Chur, Switzerland, in December 2024. https://www.eddi-conferences.eu/