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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/
 

European DDI Users Conference (EDDI): 27-29 November

The 15th European DDI Users Conference will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia from 27-29 November 2023. The conference is being generously hosted by the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP).

Details of how to register are at: https://events.geant.org/event/1457/page/11-registration.

There will be 2 workshops/tutorials on the Monday followed by 35 presentations on the Tuesday/Wednesday from a wide range of organisations and individuals on all things DDI, and related issues.

The draft program is available at: https://events.geant.org/event/1457/timetable/#20231127.detailed

Details of getting to the venue and accommodation are available at: https://events.geant.org/event/1457/page/10-travel-accommodation

We look forward to welcoming you to Ljubljana.

Mari Kleemola & Jon Johnson

EDDI 2023 co-chairs

DDI Meet and Greet for World Preservation Day on November 2, 16:00 UTC

 
Do you have questions about the Data Documentation Initiative standard and how it can help you preserve your data and metadata ? Come and meet DDI Training group members and ask all the questions you have on Thursday November 2, 2023 between 16:00-17:00 UTC. 
 
You can ask your questions in English or French (we'll split in Zoom break-out zooms).
 
To attend this online event, please register here
 

Scheduled Website Maintenance: October 21-22

The DDI Alliance website will be offline (unavailable) for several minutes at one or more points between 11 p.m. Saturday, October 21 and 4 a.m. Sunday, October 22 Eastern Time Zone. The websites may be offline for longer during that time window if a problem unexpectedly occurs.

For more information about the scheduled maintenance, please see: https://status.its.umich.edu/report.php?id=157593.

DDI-CDI in Focus: 2023 Dagstuhl Workshops

This year, two workshops were held at Schloss Dagstuhl (Wadern, Germany) which involved DDI.

The first, “DDI-CDI: Realising Interoperable Data Services in the Metadata Ecosystem,” took place from 24 to 29 September, and included 25 participants from 21 organizations in 11 countries. The DDI-CDI Working Group was in attendance, supplemented by invited experts. The focus of the workshop was on implementing DDI-CDI, and supporting those who wish to learn more about the standard and implement it. The work was very productive, with the work organized into several different areas:

  • General overview of the specification and the problem space it is meant to address, including how it relates to other standards implemented in a modular way

  • Specific work around the creation of examples and implementation guides, including a “how-to” paper addressing a methodology for creating community specific implementation guides, a worked example mining the metadata embedded in an SPSS file into DDI-CDI’s XML expression, and the development of a prototype tool for use by developers to generate samples, taking a CSV file as input and easily allowing the generation of a DDI-CDI description in JSON-LD (and also other flavors of DDI)

  • A proposal on how non-numeric, non-coded data (e.g. qualitative data) could be described in an integrated fashion with quantitative data sets within the DDI-CDI model

  • Alignment of DDI-CDI with external models which describe the dependencies between variables in cross-domain integration scenarios, based om the RDA’s I-ADOPT standard and the OGC’s Observations’ Measurements standard

  • Syntax representation of the DDI-CDI model, including Python, Typescript, ShEx, SHACL, and JSON Schema.

In each of these areas, the outputs will be incorporated into the work of the DDI-CDI WG moving forward, and will result in the publication of guidance and documentation for users, tools for developers and implementers, and new features for the DDI-CDI model. Also addressed were issues around better supporting implementers through interactions with the DDI Developer’s Group and with a more responsive “beta” release process, and how this could fit into the work of the Alliance overall.

The second Dagstuhl seminar, “Defining a Core Metadata Framework for Cross-Domain Data Sharing and Reuse,” was held from 2-6 October, with 24 participants from 22 organizations in 12 countries. It was focused on the development of the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF), being developed through the WorldFAIR project, in which DDI-CDI is combined with many other domain neutral standards to support easier exchange of metadata and data across disciplinary and infrastructural boundaries. These external standards include Schema.org and DCAT (for discovery and cataloguing), PROV-O (for describing provenance), SKOS, XKOS, and OWL for describing controlled vocabularies and ontologies, and SSSOM for describing mappings. The focus of this work is on the practical implementation of the FAIR principles in cross-domain scenarios, and it promises to provide a strong basis for the adoption of DDI-CDI as part of this suite of standards. Like the first week, this workshop was very productive, and built on the outputs of the week focusing on DDI-CDI which had just taken place.

Thanks to all of the participants and organizers, and especially to the DDI Alliance and CODATA for providing support for this work. As always, Schloss Dagstuhl provides a unique setting for doing focused work, and for making it possible to be incredibly productive.

DDI Sponsorship of the 3rd IASSIST Africa Regional Workshop

The DDI Alliance was happy to sponsor the 3rd IASSIST Africa Regional Workshop, held October 18-20, 2023 at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research International Convention Centre (CSIR ICC) in Pretoria, South Africa. The workshop web site: http://iassistafrica.org/.

CODATA / DDI training webinar ‘The DDI Standards and Technology: Adapting to Change’, 17 October at 1400 UTC

Our upcoming CODATA / DDI training webinar ‘The DDI Standards and Technology: Adapting to Change‘ will take place on Tuesday 17 October at 1000 EDT / 1400 UTC / 1600 CEST.  The event will last approximately 90 minutes.  

Registration is now open – please register herehttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZElduitpj8sG92KybAQl5Ji6BOiCUYn0R2N

The technology landscape is always changing, and with the advent of AI technologies the pace has increased. This webinar looks at the technologies and practices around DDI metadata today, and how the new technologies could be used to increase efficiencies in the work of documenting data and in the use of the data itself. There will be time for questions and answers.

Current examples of production flows for metadata will be shown, covering the DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle standards, and the possibilities for leveraging ChatGPT and similar technologies demonstrated. The webinar is intended for data managers and disseminators concerned with documenting data and producing metadata at scale.

Our speakers are:

I. DDI and Technology Evolution (from DTDs for documentation to metadata-driven systems – brief overview) (Arofan Gregory, DDI/CODATA)

II. Production of DDI Codebook metadata for ODESI (Alex Cooper, Data Services Coordinator at Queen's University)

III. Production of DDI Lifecycle at the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) (Jennifer Zeiger, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)

IV. ChatGPT and Metadata – possible uses and enhancements in efficiency (Pascal Heus, AI / Data Lead and FAIR Open Data APIs advocate, Postman Open Technologies)

 

The webinar is free to attend but registration is required.  Please register herehttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZElduitpj8sG92KybAQl5Ji6BOiCUYn0R2N 

We look forward to seeing you on 17 October!

Re-establishing the DDI Marketing Group and seeking new leadership

Dear DDI community,

 

At the May DDI Annual meeting, the Executive Board was charged with re-establishing the Marketing Working Group. We are writing to keep members informed about progress and to find new leadership for the working group.

 

The Alliance has undergone significant changes over the last 5 years, and it is evident that our Marketing challenge is moving from a situation where we support three mature products (DDI-Codebook, DDI Controlled Vocabularies and DDI-Lifecycle) to one where we now support two additional products (XKOS and STDL) and future products, such as DDI-CDI.

 

We strongly believe that it is time to take stock of this new landscape, better understand the current and future needs of our membership and of the wider community we support, and assist the Executive Board in helping to prioritise the Marketing effort as part of a wider review of our future strategic plan.

 

In order to achieve this, the Executive Board has drafted a new mission statement for the Marketing Working Group, which includes:

 

  • Market Identification and Audiences
  • Highlight DDI Strengths for Each Audience, and
  • DDI Promotion to Different Audiences.

 

We are now making a call for a person(s) with significant marketing experience from the DDI and/or data management community to lead this new work as part of a revitalised Marketing Working Group. The Executive Board is able to provide funding to support this role should it be required.

 

Please contact secretariat@ddialliance.org if you are interested or have questions. 


Jon Johnson
Chair, Executive Board