Involved in the organization and programming of EDDI, the annual conference for users of the DDI data documentation standard in Europe, the CDSP also contributes to the conference presentations.

On December 1st and 2nd, Alina Danciu, Lucie Marie, Geneviève Michaud, and Baptiste Rouxel will lead three online sessions.

CDSP's sessions

DDI, Dataverse and Colectica: our data management combo (by Alina Danciu  and Geneviève Michaud)

Providing to our community a user-friendly interface and data visualisation tool, a powerful search engine and a fluid data download process have always been top priorities of the French Center for Socio-Political Data. In the past year, we worked intensively to implement our Dataverse repository, which answers at least partially to these questions.

During the process of importing our Nesstar metadata into Dataverse, we encountered a certain number of issues we had not anticipated, primarily linked to the compatibility between DDI-C and Dataverse. This presentation will mainly tackle this topic, as well as the process of implementing the DDI controlled vocabularies and the harmonisation process of our metadata (institution names, authors, keywords...). 

In terms of variable management and visualisation, we decided to experiment with the Colectica tools (Designer, Repository and Portal), that we recently implemented at the CDSP and that we intend to use in order to build a DDI-L question bank. The project is in its experimental phase. We'll offer feedback on the our data management choices at this stage, complementary with our Dataverse tool.

Customizing a DDI compliant repository: a detailed course with Dataverse (by Geneviève Michaud and Baptiste Rouxel)

Among academic institutions data repositories are a trending addition to the ecosystem of open science, and more often than not, there is a push towards self hosting. Dataverse is one of the most popular software in such cases, as it offers out of the box much desirable features, focusing on explorability, interoperability and a promise for flexibility. From a software development point of view, the open model driven by community feedback is a great asset.

Since 2018 at the Center for Socio-Political Data, we opted for migrating our DDI metadata bank from Nesstar to Dataverse. We were eager to customise Dataverse metadata schema to follow as closely as possible the Cessda Metadata Model main elements defined by our metadata experts (controlled vocabularies). We had to compose with a quite relaxed implementation of DDI 2.5 standard by Dataverse.

We will share strategies, tools and workarounds we set up to approach our goal. We have also strived to make the most out of the tool, using templating mechanisms or enhancing the user interface. We will conclude with a selective list of features we want to promote in order to better align Dataverse with standards as DDI or OAI-PMH.

Using Colectica to document socio-political surveys in DDI-Lifecycle: feedback and benefits (by Lucie Marie)

With the Open Science movement, the patterns of data sharing are evolving. In this context, the French Center for socio-political data has launched in 2020 an experimental project that aims to build a question bank using DDI-Lifecycle and Colectica - Designer, Repository and Portal. Beyond the final goal to be compliant with the CESSDA repositories standards, so that data and metadata may be harvested in the European Question Bank, this new tool is implemented for two additional purposes. On the one hand, to make data more discoverable and findable at variable level. On the other hand, to implement an internal less time-consuming documentation protocol by defining a metadata model at the variable level – a reference document for data managers to check for paradigms of organized data. 

This presentation outlines the main steps of the process of implementation of DDI-Lifecycle using the Colectica softwares package, including challenges met to build the question bank. More broadly, it gives feedback about the entry cost of the shift from DDI-Codebook to DDI-Lifecycle, as well as the process of enhancing metadata documentation quality, especially harmonization of items and work on granularity at the variable level.

Join us!

Once is not custom, the sessions are open to all, free of charge.

Take this opportunity to discover the potential of the DDI standard! To do so, nothing could be simpler, just register for the webinars of the sessions that interest you and download the Zoom application. 

You will receive the login links to participate in the conference.