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DDI Agency Registry
Overview
A particularly challenging aspect of using the DDI specification is the necessity to uniquely identify agencies responsible for the various stages of the data life cycle or the metadata compilation. This is particularly true for DDI 3.0 where all maintainable objects and their identifiable descendants must be associated with an agency identifier that has to theoretically remain globally unique. Usually, this information is maintained by the organization or individual in charge of the metadata. While this is acceptable in a closed environment, it no longer holds in a shared or public space where duplicates or inconsistent identifiers quickly emerge.
To address this issue, the DDI Alliance is working with the community and its partners to establish a global registry of agencies that will be publicly available online. The system will be accessible to applications through web services and to users through a simple web-based interface. Registration will be open to any organization involved in the survey life cycle or using DDI and will allow them to obtain a permanently assigned and globally unique ID. The registry will contain minimal information on the agency itself and will also later be used to point to local DDI-related web services (such as a DDI registry).
Managing such service, however, is not a trivial task. Many technical and organizational aspects must be considered and addressed before making it available. A paper documenting these challenges is currently being drafted and will shortly be made available to interested parties. If you feel you have an interest in participating and contributing to such project or simply want to be kept informed, contact us by email and we will include you in future communications.
In the meantime, we recognize that it is crucial for early adopters of DDI 3.0 to immediately start using unique global identifiers. We therefore provide below an unofficial pre-registration form that will allow organizations to request and reserve an identifier in the future registry.
The currently agreed upon format for identifiers is based on a system similar to Internet domain names but that will not change across time and includes additional metadata such as the registry name itself. The format is [organization].[country].[registry] where in our case registry is always the value "ddi". The latter is necessary to allow down the road for other registries to exist and prevent ID clashes.
Agency ID registration form
A few ground rules if you plan to register your organization:- Only request an ID if you really need it today. We want to minimize the risk for your identifier to change in the future as well as the burden of maintaining this process at this time.
- There is no guarantee that the ID naming scheme will not change (though we will try to avoid this as much as possible).
- There is no guarantee that the requested ID will be approved.
- Keep your ID short, if possible, as this will appear in many elements of your DDI.
- .com, .net extensions are not allowed. Only .org or possibly .int can be used for regional or global organizations. Otherwise, national or sub-national organizations must use their 2-letter ISO 3166 country code.
- Check the list below for examples and to make sure the identifier has not yet been registered.
- Be patient. We will try to respond as soon as possible to your query but our resources are limited.
List of pre-registered agency identifiers
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