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What is DDI?

What does DDI stand for?

  • Data Documentation Initiative

What is it?

  • A free suite of standards/products originating from data professionals (within the behavioral, social and economic sciences) who realized the need for standards which
    • Document your data to make it more Discoverable and Interoperable between systems
    • Offer a framework to describe the research data produced and the processes used
    • Are platform-agnostic
    • Facilitate understanding, interpretation, and use by people, software systems, and computer networks
    • Have a great community of researchers who want their research data to be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
    • Offer lots of free training materials to support new and existing users
    • Allow for cross-domain usage (New! See below)

How many DDI standards are there?

  • There are three different DDI standards:
    • DDI-Codebook (DDI-C)
      • Intended to document simple or single survey data
      • Has the same information describing a dataset that you would find in the codebook for a dataset
      • Used in the Dataverse data repository
      • Based on XML
    • DDI-Lifecycle (DDI-L)
      • Can be used to document each stage of the lifecycle of a dataset
      • Can be used for longitudinal datasets
      • Can describe more than one dataset
      • Based on XML
    • DDI-CDI (Cross-Domain Integration)
      • Suitable for integration of data from different research disciplines or domains (cross-domain) purposes
      • Focuses on data description and process/provenance
      • Handles data from different structure types (wide, long multidimensional, key value/big data)
      • Based on UML (Unified Modeling Language)
      • Can be expressed in different syntax representations, for example XML

Who looks after DDI, governs it?

  • The DDI Alliance is the overarching organization with an international membership
  • The secretariat is housed at ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)

Does it relate to other standards?

Learn more about DDI!