What is DDI?

What does DDI stand for?

• Data Documentation Initiative

What is it?

• A free suite of standards/products originating from data professionals (within the behavioral, social and economic sciences) who realized the need for standards which
  • Document your data to make it more Discoverable and Interoperable between systems
  • Offer a framework to describe the research data produced and the processes used
  • Are platform-agnostic
  • Facilitate understanding, interpretation, and use by people, software systems, and computer networks
  • Have a great community of researchers who want their research data to be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
  • Offer lots of free training materials to support new and existing users
  • Allow for cross-domain usage (New! See below)

How many DDI standards are there?

• There are three different DDI standards:
  • DDI Codebook (DDI-C)
    • Intended to document simple or single survey data
    • Has the same information describing a dataset that you would find in the codebook for a dataset
    • Used in the Dataverse data repository
    • Based on XML
  • DDI Lifecycle (DDI-L)
    • Can be used to document each stage of the lifecycle of a dataset
    • Can be used for longitudinal datasets
    • Can describe more than one dataset
    • Based on XML
  • DDI Cross-Domain Integration (DDI-CDI)
    • Suitable for integration of data from different research disciplines or domains (cross-domain) purposes
    • Focuses on data description and process/provenance
    • Handles data from different structure types (wide, long multidimensional, key value/big data)
    • Based on UML (Unified Modeling Language)
    • Can be expressed in different syntax representations, for example XML

Who looks after DDI, governs it?

• The DDI Alliance is the overarching organization with an international membership
• The secretariat is housed at ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)

Does it relate to other standards?

• Yes, check out the Relationship to Other Standards page for more information

Learn more about DDI!

• Check out our Training Materials
• Interested in Training?
  • Fill out our Training Request Form
• Have some more questions?
  • Contact us