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

This 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 will 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 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.