Working Papers

The DDI Working Paper Series (ISSN 2153-8247) is intended as a dynamic publication avenue for authors working in the DDI space. Currently, the series includes papers on new and emerging themes as well as papers on best practices and use case literature.

If you are interested in publishing a paper to be part of the DDI Working Paper Series, please contact the DDI Alliance Director.

Best Practice: Data Life Cycle

DDI as Content for Registries

By Askitas, Nikos, Peter Granda, Arofan Gregory, Rob Grim, Pascal Heus, Maarten Hoogerwerf, Jeremy Iverson, Ken Miller, Sigbjorn Revheim, and Jannik Vestergaard Jensen.
This document defines registries and provides a justification for using them.

High-Level Architectural Model for DDI Applications

By Dinkelmann, Karl, Pascal Heus, Chuck Humphrey, Jeremy Iverson, Jannik Jensen, Sigbjorn Revheim, and Joachim Wackerow.
This best practices document looks at a possible architectural model to enable effective design of components that can be combined to create DDI applications.

DDI 3.0 URNs and Entity Resolution

By Askitas, Nikos, Janet Eisenhauer, Arofan Gregory, Rob Grim, Pascal Heus, Maarten Hoogerwerf, and Wolfgang Zenk-Moltgen.
This document is a recommendation about appropriate architecture for the effective resolution of DDI URNs.

Management of DDI 3.0 Unique Identifiers

By Nikos Askitas, Arofan Gregory, and Maarten Hoogerwerf.
This best practice specifies the technical requirements and procedures for ensuring well-managed identifiers for both internal use and external references.

Implementation and Governance

By Edwards, Michelle, Jane Fry, Peter Granda, Kirstine Kolsrud, Stefan Kramer, Ken Miller, Ron Nakao, and Mary Vardigan.
This best practice covers the process of developing agreements and guidelines for implementation and governance of DDI as a metadata scheme for a community.

Versioning and Publication

By Edwards, Michelle, Janet Eisenhauer, Jane Fry, Pascal Heus, Kirstine Kolsrud, Meinhard Moschner, Ron Nakao, and Wendy Thomas.
This best practice is designed to provide some guidelines to metadata creators and publishers about how to version metadata and publish it for others to use to comply with requirements for machine-actionability.

DDI 3.0 Schemes

By Linnerud, Jenny, Hans Jorgen Marker, Meinhard Moschner, and Wendy Thomas.
This best practice covers DDI publishing structures that promote reuse of common material by removing certain metadata content from the context of a specific study and publishing it for wider use.

Creating a DDI Profile

By Ionescu, Sanda.
This document outlines recommended best practices for creating a local DDI 3.0 Profile, which is a subset of DDI 3.0 fields to be used by an organization or shared by a community of users.

Controlled Vocabularies

By Granda, Peter, Stefan Kramer, Jenny Linnerud, Hans Jorgen Marker, Ken Miller, and Mary Vardigan.
The benefits of using controlled vocabularies, which offer consistency, precision, and interoperability, within DDI metadata creation are the primary underlying principles behind this best practice document.

Work flows for Metadata Creation Regarding Recoding, Aggregation and Other Data Processing Activities

By Marker, Hans Jorgen, Wolfgang Zenk-Mﾚltgen, Wendy Thomas, and Achim Wackerow.
This best practice discusses the capturing, in DDI metadata, of the processes of data aggregation, recoding and data processing.

Work flows - Archival Ingest and Metadata Enhancement

By Dinkelmann, Karl, Michelle Edwards, Jane Fry, Chuck Humphrey, Kirstine Kolsrud, Stefan Kramer, Jenny Linnerud, Hans Jorgen Marker, Meinhard Moschner, Ron Nakao, Wendy Thomas, Achim Wackerow, and Wolfgang Zenk- Mﾚltgen.
This Best Practice discusses workflows for DDI usage in the context of archival ingest and metadata enhancement, beginning at the point of the handoff between the data provider and the archive.

Work flows - Data Discovery and Dissemination: User Perspective

By Dinkelmann, Karl, Michelle Edwards, Jane Fry, Chuck Humphrey, Ron Nakao, and Wendy Thomas.
This best practice escribes the best practices for metadata producers to provide end users with the resources for data discovery and dissemination.

Best Practice: Longitudinal

Presenting Longitudinal Studies to End Users Effectively Using DDI Metadata

By Kramer, Stefan, Randy Banks, Vicky Chang, Ingo Sieber, Mary Vardigan, and Wolfgang Zenk-Moltgen.
This paper proposes best practice for the use of DDI to ensure that there are appropriate metadata to compare data produced across repeated data collection over time.

Metadata for the Longitudinal Data Life Cycle

By Hoyle, Larry, Fortunato Castillo, Benjamin Clark, Neeraj Kashyap, Denise Perpich, Joachim Wackerow, and Knut Wenzig.
This paper proposes a reference model, the Generic Longitudinal Business Process Model (GLBPM), for the process of longitudinal data production and use, with an emphasis on the specification and management of the supporting metadata.

Generic Longitudinal Business Process Model

By Barkow, Ingo, William Block, Jay Greenfield, Arofan Gregory, Marcel Hebing, Larry Hoyle, and Wolfgang Zenk-Moltgen.
This paper looks at the unique characteristics of longitudinal data and offers recommendations for structuring metadata in a manner that facilitates analysis over time and metadata reuse.

Enabling Longitudinal Data Comparison Using DDI

By Hansen, Sue Ellen, Jeremy Iverson, Uwe Jensen, Hilde Orten, and Johanna Vompras.
This paper looks at the growing variety of data sources in research -- e.g., biomarkers -- that are not traditional question-based surveys, and how these can be usefully documented.

Documenting a Wider Variety of Data Using the Data Documentation Initiative 3.1

By Block, William C., Christian Bilde Andersen, Daniel E. Bontempo, Arofan Gregory, Stan Howald, Douglas Kieweg, and Barry T. Radler.
This paper is intended to provide implementers and those delivering longitudinal data with recommendations on how to use DDI most effectively to support the presentation of longitudinal studies, most commonly on the Web, and to describe best practice for structuring DDI instances.