Data Documentation Initiative: Toward a Standard for the Social Sciences

Abstract

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an emerging metadata standard for the social sciences. The DDI is in active use by many data specialists and archivists, but researchers themselves have been slow to recognize the benefits of the standards approach to metadata. This paper outlines how the DDI has evolved since its inception in 1995 and discusses ways to broaden its impact in the social science research community.

Advancing research data publishing practices for the social sciences: from archive activity to empowering researchers

“…The DDI is a rich and detailed metadata standard for social, behavioural and economic sciences data, used by most social science data archives in the world [19,20]. DDI records contain mandatory and optional metadata elements relating to study description, data file description, and variable description.…”

CED²AR: The Comprehensive Extensible Data Documentation and Access Repository

“…The DDI metadata format [42], specified by the DDI Alliance 2 , originated in 1995 and is one of the most advanced and widely used metadata standard for social science data. It has emerged as a de facto standard and is used by many social science data organizations and projects around the world, including: the Australian Social Science Data Archives, the European Social Survey, the General Social Survey, ICPSR, The Institute for the Study of Labor (Germany), and the World Bank.…”

A social science data-fusion tool and the Data Management through e-Social Science (DAMES) infrastructure

“…Steps towards the former objective have been made outside DAMES, most notably in the standardized documentation requirements and approaches employed by data archives such as the UK Data Archive (UKDA). These define the preparation and storage of original materials (van den Eynden et al 2009) and the growing adoption of DDI for organizing metadata about such data resources (Vardigan et al 2008). The contribution of DAMES is in supporting the collection of comparable levels of standardized documentation for supplementary data resources (e.g.…”