HTML on Steroids: A Report on the Data Documentation Initiative Beta-Tests

HTML on Steroids: A Report on the Data Documentation Initiative Beta-Tests

Organizer: Cindy Severt, Data and Program Library Services, University of Wisconsin

In the winter of 1999, ICPSR and the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) committee announced a beta-test of a new metadata standard for social science documentation. This standard, Data Type Definition (DTD), was developed by representatives from the international social science research community to fill the need for a structured codebook standard that would serve as an interchange format and permit the development of new Web applicatons. DTD is based on a tag library of elements and attributes, and is compliant with Extensible Markup Language (XML). Unlike HTML documents, XML documents can be linked and accessed through hypermedia tools; their contents can be used by other apploications and queried as a database. Such flexibility has given rise t o the phrase, "HTML on steroids."

The DDI beta-test was conducted over a four month period from March 15 to July 15, 1999 and involved an international cadre of thirteen funded participating sites. A member of the DDI committee will present an overview of the beta-test and what it hop ed to accomplish. Representatives from two of the beta-test sites will offer their conclusions about the effectiveness of the DTD.