NADDI Conference Held in Washington, D.C.

Submitted by lyle on Fri, 2018-04-06 16:42

NADDI 2018, the 6th Annual North American DDI User Conference, took place April 4-6, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The conference was hosted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and was attended by nearly 90 participants.

The conference program included 25 presentations, 5 posters, and 2 workshops, and opened with a plenary panel on the importance of open standards in federal statistics and research. Plenary panelists included: John Abowd, Associate Director for Research and Methodology & Chief Scientist, U.S. Census Bureau, and Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Cornell University; Robert M. Groves, Executive Vice President and Provost, Georgetown University, and Director, U.S. Census Bureau (2009-2012); and John H. Thompson, Executive Director, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS), Director, U.S. Census Bureau (2013-2017), and CEO, NORC at the University of Chicago (2008-2013). Margaret Levenstein, Director of the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, moderated the panel.

In their remarks, the plenary panelists emphasized the increased demand for metadata standards and trained metadata specialists. "We are moving into a world of data that is much more complicated than the old world. Your knowledge is needed....This is an era of unprecedented opportunity for implementation of standards," noted Dr. Groves.

Save the Date: DDI Alliance Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada (28 May)

Submitted by lyle on Thu, 2018-03-15 16:58

The DDI Alliance will hold its annual meeting on Monday, May 28, 2018, in room LB-362 of the Webster Library, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Montreal, Canada (the day before the start of the IASSIST conference). This is an opportunity for Alliance members to learn about Alliance activities and provide feedback on priorities for the coming year.

The morning will be devoted to the Meeting of Members and the afternoon to the meeting of the Scientific Board, with lunch provided in between. As noted in previous years, in most cases it will be the same person attending both meetings, but do feel free to send different people.

More details about the meeting, including a full agenda, will be available soon. We hope to see many of you at the meeting.

Update on DDI 4 project management and consultants

Submitted by lyle on Thu, 2018-03-15 11:36

Dear DDI community

In December, I wrote to update you on DDI work product development, including plans to release a prototype of the DDI 4 specification in mid-2018. (The full message is posted on the Alliance web site: http://www.ddialliance.org/announcement/update-on-ddi-work-product-development.)

I'm writing now to update you about two new hires we've made to help with the DDI 4 prototype release. Both are one-year, term-limited positions, and were approved by the DDI Executive Board.

1) DDI 4 project manager (Kelly Chatain) -- This position collaborates with the several DDI 4 working groups, including the modeling team and the Technical Committee, to insure a coordinated and timely prototype release. Kelly is an active DDI community member and is knowledgeable about the technical side of DDI development work. She has moderated several Dagstuhl "Moving Forward" workshops, is chair of the Web Site working group, and is involved in the Marketing and Partnerships working group. Kelly is posting DDI 4 project management activities and updates here: https://ddi-alliance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DDI4/pages/491651/Project+Management.

2) RDF consultant (Eric Prud'hommeaux) -- DDI 4 has the goal of being expressed in multiple bindings, including but not limited to XML Schema and RDFS/OWL. The Alliance requested assistance to provide the basic work on the creation of the RDFS/OWL binding of the UML model. Eric Prud'hommeaux, an engineer at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has been selected as the expert consultant to develop concepts, select appropriate techniques, and give general advice regarding questions in the area of Semantic Web technologies. RDFS/OWL activities are being documented here: https://ddi-alliance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DDI4/pages/246874113/RDFS+OWL+Team.

Additionally, in November, the Executive Board recommended that the previous DDI 4 Advisory Group be updated so it moves primarily into a project management role. This included updating the group membership to:

Project manager (Kelly Chatain)
Executive Board chair (Steve McEachern)
Scientific Board chair (Joachim Wackerow)
Technical Board chair (Wendy Thomas)
Executive Director (Jared Lyle)

After the mid-2018 prototype release, the Advisory Group composition and functions will be reevaluated. I want to personally thank past Advisory Group members Larry Hoyle, Dan Gillman, and Jon Johnson for actively contributing to the Advisory Group these past two or more years. And since all continue to lead or significantly contribute to DDI 4 development, they are still actively involved in the community.

Feel free to contact me with questions or comments.

Sincerely,
Jared Lyle
Director, DDI Alliance
ICPSR, University of Michigan

NADDI conference to open with distinguished panel of U.S. Census experts

Submitted by lyle on Mon, 2018-03-05 00:00

The organizing committee of the North American Data Documentation Initiative (NADDI) conference is pleased to announce a distinguished panel of guests who will open the NADDI 2018 conference on April 5th with a plenary panel on the importance of open standards in federal statistics and research. Margaret Levenstein, Director of the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, will moderate the panel. The distinguished panelists include:

John M. Abowd, Associate Director for Research and Methodology & Chief Scientist, U.S. Census Bureau; Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Cornell University
Robert M. Groves, Executive Vice President and Provost, Georgetown University; Director, U.S. Census Bureau, 2009-2012
John H. Thompson, Executive Director, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS); Director, U.S. Census Bureau, 2013-2017; CEO, NORC at the University of Chicago, 2008-2013

All three panelists hold current and past positions at the U.S. Census Bureau, in addition to notable careers in the survey research, demographics, and statistical methodology fields. The NADDI 2018 conference is being hosted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and will include three days of presentations, training, and networking about the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and the importance of documenting social science data and metadata using technical standards. DDI (http://www.ddialliance.org/) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.

For more information and to register, please see http://naddiconf.org/2018/.

North American DDI conference: registration open + agenda posted

Submitted by lyle on Wed, 2018-02-14 12:00

North American DDI 2018 conference: Registration open

Registration is now open for the 6th Annual North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference (NADDI). The conference theme is "Benefits of Describing National Statistics with Common Standards," which emphasizes the benefits of using metadata to drive efficiencies in a research data lifecycle, as well as promotes subsequent re-use of end data products, especially those generated by federal and national statistical agencies. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.

Important Information

March 5: Early-bird registration deadline
Conference Dates: April 4-6, 2018
Conference Location: Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C.

NADDI 2018 Agenda

A distinguished plenary panel will open NADDI 2018 on April 5th. Dr. Maggie Levenstein, Director of the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, will moderate a discussion comprised of the following discussants:

Dr. John M. Abowd, Associate Director for Research and Methodology & Chief Scientist, U.S. Census Bureau; Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Cornell University
Dr. Robert M. Groves, Executive Vice President and Provost, Georgetown University; Director, U.S. Census Bureau, 2009-2012
Dr. John H. Thompson, Executive Director, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS); Director, U.S. Census Bureau, 2013-2017; CEO, NORC at the University of Chicago, 2008-2013

Pre-conference workshops will be held on April 4th, with the main conference held April 5-6. The full agenda is on the conference web site

How to Register

Registration is found on the conference web site. The deadline for early-bird registration is March 5, 2018.

Update on DDI work product development

Submitted by lyle on Tue, 2017-12-19 23:50

Dear colleagues,

Since our inception in 1995, the DDI Alliance has developed work products to meet the evolving needs of our user communities and changes in technology. Our stable work products include:

DDI-Codebook (DDI 2) – an XML structure for describing codebooks (or data dictionaries), for a single study.
DDI-Lifecycle (DDI 3) – an XML structure that expands on the coverage of a single study along the data lifecycle and can describe several waves of data collection, and even ad hoc collections of datasets grouped for the purposes of comparison.

The Alliance continues to support, develop, and encourage the adoption of these specifications.

At the same time, the Alliance is continuing development to meet new user and technology needs, especially to address limitations of the standard. Our newest development is what we are calling DDI 4 and will be very different from earlier DDI work products because it will be based on an information model of the metadata content. This information model will be available for implementation in standard RDF vocabularies and standard XML structures, which will be equivalent. This form of model-based standard is a best practice in the world of standardization, and several other standards in other domains have been using this approach for many years. Developing DDI 4 is a way of protecting the standard against technological change, and a way of guaranteeing alignment across different technology implementations. [1]

Work on DDI 4 has been underway for several years and we are planning to release a prototype of the specification in mid-2018. This preliminary version is not intended for production but will provide an opportunity to test and provide feedback on how the DDI 4 model describes and documents some basic research material, such as a dataset, an instrument, and a codebook. A specific list of possible use cases will be made available to review and apply once the prototype is released.

The Alliance will provide additional information about the prototype release in the coming months. In the meantime, feel free to contact ddisecretariat@umich.edu with questions.

DDI Alliance Executive Board

Steve McEachern, Australia Data Archive (Chair)

William Block, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (Vice Chair)

Catherine Fitch, Minnesota Population Center

Dana Müller, Research Data Centre of the Federal Employment Agency, Institute for Employment Research

Barry Rader, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Joachim Wackerow, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

Margaret Levenstein, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

Jared Lyle, ICPSR and DDI Alliance Director (ex officio)

[1] For more details about DDI 4, please see the Work Products of the DDI Alliance web page, as well as the Alliance working paper “Developing a Model-Driven DDI Specification”.

EDDI Conference Held in Lausanne

Submitted by lyle on Sat, 2017-12-09 16:26

EDDI17, the 9th Annual European DDI User Conference, took place December 5-6, 2017, in Lausanne, Switzerland. The conference was hosted by FORS - Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, and organized jointly by FORS, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.

There were nearly 100 participants from over 50 organisations and 20 countries. The conference program included 28 presentations and 6 posters, 3 tutorials, and 2 side meetings. Keynote addresses were given by Ron Dekker ("DDI Is Not Enough"), and Ingo Barkow ("Research Data Management in Switzerland - a National Perspective").

Save the date for the next EDDI!

EDDI2018 will be hosted by SOEP (The Socio-Economic Panel) at DIW (German Institute for Economic Research) in Berlin, Germany December 4-5, 2018.

Extended deadline: North American DDI conference Call for Proposals

Submitted by lyle on Fri, 2017-12-01 01:17

North American DDI 2018 conference: Call for Proposals Deadline Extended!

The Call for Proposals for the 6th Annual North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference (NADDI) has been extended to December 15, 2017. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.

NADDI 2018 Theme

The conference theme is "Benefits of Describing National Statistics with Common Standards," which emphasizes the benefits of using metadata to drive efficiencies in a research data lifecycle, as well as promotes subsequent re-use of end data products, especially those generated by federal and national statistical agencies.

Aimed at individuals working in and around data and metadata, NADDI 2018 seeks submissions of presentations and posters that highlight the use of DDI and other metadata standards within research projects, official statistics, survey operations, academic libraries, and data archives.

Proposals can include:

Presentations
Panels
Posters
Workshops or Tutorials

Important Information

December 15: Deadline for conference proposals
January 5: Notification of acceptance
February 14: Early-bird registration deadline
Conference Dates: April 4-6, 2018
Conference Location: Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C.

How to Submit

Submissions may be made through the conference web site. The proposal deadline is December 15, 2017.

Sent on behalf of the NADDI 2018 Organizing Committee

European DDI User Conference: December 5-6 in Lausanne, Switzerland

Submitted by lyle on Mon, 2017-11-27 21:55

The 9th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI16) will take place December 5-6, 2017 in Lausanne, Switzerland. EDDI17 is organized jointly by FORS - Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and IDSC of IZA - International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor.

The meeting will bring together DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world. Registration is open. More information is available on the Conference web page.

North American DDI conference Call for Proposals now open!

Submitted by lyle on Sun, 2017-10-22 18:29

We are happy to announce the Call for Proposals for the 6th Annual North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference (NADDI). The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.