Metadata Uplift – PDF/Excel to Structured DDI Documentation

The third webinar in the 2022 CODATA-DDI Alliance webinar series took place on Thu 16 June 2022 on the topic, “Metadata Uplift – PDF/Excel to Structured DDI Documentation”.

Many organizations document their data using formats such as PDF and Excel. While useful to readers, the metadata which makes up the core ‘documentation’ is not fully machine-actionable. This webinar explores the ways in which organizations can take existing data documentation in typical formats and produce structured, machine-actionable XML metadata according to the DDI Codebook (DDI-C) and DDI Lifecycle (DDI-L) standards. The goal of the workshop is to introduce some common approaches based on existing tools and the real-world experience of DDI users who have faced and met this challenge. Our panel of expert speakers, included Arofan Gregory, consultant; Hayley Mills, CLOSER (https://www.closer.ac.uk/); and Adrian Dusa, University of Bucharest.

While most common in the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences, the DDI standards are also used in public health, official statistics, and in other domains where populations are being observed. The forthcoming DDI Cross-Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) is also be briefly introduced, as a means of exposing SBE data to other domains for reuse, building on the foundations of structured metadata in DDI-C and DDI-L.