What's new [See all news]

May 21, 2008 — The Alliance for the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is pleased to announce the official release of Version 3.0 of the DDI XML specification for documenting social science data. This long awaited version of the DDI represents a major advance by fully incorporating XML Schemas and moving to a data life cycle approach. We thank all the members of the DDI working groups as well as DDI users who have volunteered their time and efforts over the past years to make this specification a reality.

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is a project to create an international standard in XML for metadata describing social science data. The DDI Alliance is a self-sustaining membership organization whose members guide the development of the DDI specification.

For further information, visit http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi3/ or contact ddi@ddialliance.org.

The final version of the DDI 3.0 Schema (Candidate Release Version 3, dated 2008-04-01) is now available for download and review from this site:

http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi3/index.html

As a Proof of Concept to demonstrate the validity and usefulness of the proposed new version, several use cases and implementations are descrbed at:

http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi3/use-cases.html

The current timetable for publication of the DDI 3.0 version is now set as follows:

Review period: April 8-20

Alliance vote: April 21-27

Official publication of DDI 3.0: April 28

Candidate Release Version 3 (CR3) is now available from the DDI Alliance Web site at: http://www.ddialliance.org/ddi3/index.html. The “Latest Release” link will take you to SourceForge for the actual download.

We are getting very close to having a final version of DDI 3.0 to vote on in April. The timetable for publication is:
Final version available: April 3
Review period: April 4-20
Alliance vote: April 21-27
Official publication of DDI 3.0: April 28

Between now and April 3, the Technical Implementation Committee (TIC) is continuing to make corrections to the schema on a weekly basis. Developers who need to work with the most current copy should check SourceForge regularly. All of the subsequent revisions to CR3 will be labeled as CR3 but with different dates. The version log in SourceForge will indicate the changes made since the last update so that developers can check to see if any changes have taken place that might affect their work. Specific questions about updates can be directed to the TIC at ddi-srg@icpsr.umich.edu.

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had.

An interesting article from IBM Research that shows how to easily add eventing to XML-based Java applications with XMLBeans extensions:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xmlbeanse/?S_TACT=105AGX54&S_CMP=B0201&ca=dnw-904

The DDI Foundation Tools Program (DDI-FTP) is pleased to announce the availability of a new web site dedicated to DDI Tools at http://tools.ddialliance.org

The site is intended for DDI users and developers and provides access to applications, software components, documentation, example files and XSL transformations that support the DDI-XML specification. It is also the home for the DDI Foundation Tools Program, an initiative aiming to provide application developers with a set of reusable components, operating in a harmonized environment based on open source technologies, to manage DDI metadata and their related data and resources (http://tools.ddialliance.org/?lvl1=ftp).

The launch of the site coincides with the initial release of the DDI-FTP Road Map (http://tools.ddialliance.org/?lvl1=ftp&lvl2=roadmap), a document that describes and prioritizes the different components of the toolkit, to be used by contributors to focus and coordinate their development efforts.

As always, we wish for the web site and the tools program to be community driven and your comments and suggestions are most welcomed. Agencies or individuals interested in contributing to the DDI-FTP are also encouraged to read more about the initiative or contact us for further information.

All the best,

The DDI-FTP team
tools@ddialliance.org

DDI, the Data Documentation Initiative, is the “codebook standard” for quantitative social datasets. This new briefing paper from the DataShare project explains the DDI as a form of metadata, how version 3 embraces a life-cycle approach to data management, and how the DDI could be exploited by OAI-compliant data repositories.

DDI and Institutional Repositories, by Luis Martinez, released 1 February, 2008.

See also http://www.disc-uk.org/deliverables.html for other project deliverables.

The DDI Foundation Tools Program has released two core packages based on the Apache XML Beans technology for the management of DDI-XML objects in the Java environment . The libraries can be downloaded at http://forge.opendatafoundation.org/gf/project/dditools/frs/
This initial version is available for all official versions of DDI 1/2.x and for the DDI 3.0 Candidate Release 2 (CR2).

XMLBeans is a technology for accessing XML by binding it to Java types. XMLBeans provides several ways to get at the XML, including:
* Through XML schema that has been compiled to generate Java types that represent schema types. In this way, you can access instances of the schema through JavaBeans-style accessors after the fashion of “getFoo” and “setFoo”.
The XMLBeans API also allows you to reflect into the XML schema itself through an XML Schema Object model.
* A cursor model through which you can traverse the full XML infoset.
* Support for XML DOM.

For a more complete introduction, see the XMLBeans Overview or Getting Started With XMLBeans.

The UKDA Data Exchange Tools (DExT) initiative in collaboration with the Open Data Foundation has just released a new version of a Java package for reading SPSS data files and export metadata in DDI 2.0 and DDI 3.0 CR 2 formats. The library also allows for the export of the data in varous ASCII formats. The package is available at and includes the JavaDocs:
http://forge.opendatafoundation.org/gf/project/ukda_dext/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=1
It is a sub-component of a DExT application aiming at the preservation and dissemination of data and metadata in standard formats but can be used re-used as a stand alone utility by other Java applications. The package is distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

The DDI Alliance has produced a brochure to be used in promoting the DDI initiative. A product of the DDI Usability and Outreach Working Group, the trifold brochure is in 8-1/2 by 11 format and is targeted at a general audience to raise awareness of the DDI project. To order print copies for distribution, please contact ddi@ddialliance.org.