News

DDI Training Materials -- Now Available in French

To meet the training needs of the French-speaking community, the DDI Training Working Group has translated several training materials that are now available on the DDI Alliance website.

Translating DDI documentation training materials

The Centre for Sociopolitical Data (CDSP) has been participating for several years in the coordination of the DDI Training Working Group, whose mission is to promote the DDI data documentation standard and provide training in its use. 

Initiated by the two co-chairs of the TWG (Alina Danciu and Hayley Mills), the coordination of this project was ensured by Lucie Marie (CDSP) in collaboration with other engineers from the CDSP and with the engineers from IR* Progedo.

The translations, validated by the DDI Alliance Scientific Advisory Board, are now available on the DDI Alliance website and archived on Zenodo .

Resources available

  • DDI Training Group (2023) “Les bases de DDI: Qu'est-ce que les métadonnées?” ". Zenodo, September 14. doi:10.5281/zenodo.8344046.
  • DDI Training Group (2023) ”Principes fondamentaux : Qu'est-ce que DDI?". Zenodo, September 14. doi:10.5281/zenodo.8344330.
  • DDI Training Group (2023) “DDI Codebook, DDI Lifecycle, et DDI Cross Domain Integration : cas d'usage et objectifs”. Zenodo, September 14. doi:10.5281/zenodo.8344316.

DDI-Lifecycle 4.0 Beta 1 -- Question and Answer session

The DDI Alliance Technical Committee invite you to a webinar presenting the recently released DDI-Lifecycle 4.0 Beta 1 and the opportunity to ask questions.

Details of the beta release are available at: https://ddialliance.org/announcement/ddi-lifecycle-40-beta-announcement

Questions and Questionnaires - New DDI Working Group

Do you work with DDI questions and/or Questionnaires? If so, you may be interested in being part of a new DDI Questionnaire/Question Working Group. 
 
The parameters and mandate need to be discussed and agreed with members, as well as input from the SB, but could include:
  • Development of best practice for implementation
  • Development of best practice for interoperability
  • Provide ideas for revisions, extensions, and feed into future versions of DDI
Please let us know if you, or someone else from your organisation, would be interested in being part of this WG by 1st February. We will then set up an initial meeting to discuss remit and chairs. 
 
Many thanks, 
Hayley
 
Dr Hayley Mills (she/her)
CLOSER Senior Metadata Officer  
<h.mills [at] ucl.ac.uk>

DDI Alliance Secretariat Offices Closed 23 December to 2 January

The DDI Alliance Secretariat offices will be closed from December 23rd to Jan 2nd for the holiday break. Our online resources remain open 24/7 at http://ddialliance.org.

Happy Holidays!

DDI Lifecycle - 4.0 beta announcement

Hello DDI Community,

The Technical Committee is happy to announce the availability of a beta version of DDI Lifecycle 4.0.

DDI Lifecycle 4.0 is managed using a Model First development approach. Content additions and changes are added to the model and the serialization formats are automatically generated. The metadata content of DDI 3.3 has been converted into the new 4.0 model.

The ddi-lifecycle-4.0-beta.1.zip package includes:

  • schema.xsd - XML Schema
  • jsonSchema.json - JSON Schema
  • ddi4.xmi - OMG's UML XMI 2.5
  • ddi4.owl - RDF OWL (closed with restrictions)
  • ddi4.owl.ttl - RDF OWL (open)
  • ddi4.shex - ShEx
  • ddi4.shacl- SHACL

Other formats are also available but are not included in the official release. The beta package is available at: https://github.com/ddialliance/ddimodel/releases

The documentation for DDI Lifecycle 4.0 is also autogenerated from the model, and can be viewed at: https://ddialliance.github.io/ddimodel-web/

We are looking for feedback on the community's preference between the different OWL serializations and general comments about the XML and JSON. One version of the OWL models restrictions, the other is open and uses RDF shape languages to define rules. Ordering of lists in the OWL is handled using normal predicate relations combined with the addition of enumerable slots with index positions to keep the vocabularies in OWL-DL, we would like to hear the community's feedback on this approach to ordering as shown in the Sequence item type.

You can provide questions and comments back using the github issues with a free github account at: https://github.com/ddialliance/ddimodel/issues

Thank you,

DDI Technical Committee

DDI Developers virtual meeting 2024-01-19 10:00 CET

Hi!

On January 19th we plan to have a virtual developers meeting to go through current status on ongoing projects and talk about DDI related topics.
 
Date: 2024-01-19
Time: 10:00 CET
Zoom-link: contact olof.olsson[at]snd.gu.se


The suggestion for the agenda is:

  •     DDI-CDI development and preview of the current state of the model
  •     DDI projects
  •         Nectar Publisher
    Presentation of the end user focused client side tool to document datasets
  •         Other projects
  •     Next hackathon

Feel free to add to the agenda with your own topics.

To join the meeting contact olof.olsson[at]snd.gu.se to get an invite via Zoom.


Happy holidays!

DDI Community Newsletter, December 2023

Welcome to the re-issued DDI Directions newsletter for the DDI community: https://mailchi.mp/umich/ddi-community-newsletter-202312

The goal of the newsletter is to keep us all informed about the various activities and events taking place. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for newsletter content.

This issue of DDI Directions provides a look at some of the events and developments taking place in the DDI community over the past six months. As always, thanks go to all of the hardworking people who support DDI and are helping to spread its adoption.

Jared Lyle
Executive Director, DDI Alliance
secretariat@ddialliance.org

 

European DDI (EDDI) User Conference 2023 Report

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/

Call for Participation: New RDF Equivalence Working Group

Dear DDI community,

We are happy to announce the creation of the RDF equivalence working group. An implementation languages workshop was held in Paris in December of 2022. One of the recommendations that came out of that meeting was to create a list of metadata item types used across various DDI products. The common equivalent classes from the various RDF representations of DDI products including SDTL, XKOS, the next DDI Lifecycle version, and the upcoming DDI CDI could also be mapped to this list. Mappings to vocabularies created outside the DDI Alliance, such as schema.org, may also be looked into.

The initial work of this new group is to create a mapping of the most used common classes across the DDI products, defined using the owl equivalentClass.The current plan is to record these mappings using the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) [1]. SSSOM will provide a standard framework for recording the equivalences and provides tooling to generate the OWL reified axioms. The working group may expand to include OWL equivalentProperty mappings if it is found to be useful.

The group is seeking volunteers interested in RDF or that have DDI content expertise. If you are interested in joining this new working group, please let us know. We plan to schedule a kickoff meeting based on everyone’s availability.

Thanks,
Dan, Christophe, Flavio, and Wendy

[1]https://github.com/mapping-commons/sssom/
https://mapping-commons.github.io/sssom/home/