Data Documentation Initiative
The Data Documentation Initiative (also known as DDI) is an international standard for describing surveys, questionnaires, statistical data files, and social sciences study-level information. This information is described as metadata by the standard.
| Data Documentation Initiative Metadata Standard | |
![]() DDI | |
| Abbreviation | DDI |
|---|---|
| Status | Production Use |
| Year started | 1995 |
| First published | 1996 |
| Latest version | DDI 3.3 April 15, 2020 |
| Organization | DDI Alliance |
| Committee | Scientific Board and Technical Committee |
| Related standards | XML |
| Domain | Questionnaires Metadata Standard Statistical survey |
| License | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
| Website | ddialliance |
Begun in 1995,[1] the effort brings together data professionals from around the world to develop the standard. The DDI specification, most often expressed in XML, provides a format for content, exchange, and preservation of questionnaire and data file information. DDI supports the description, storage, and distribution of social science data, creating an international specification that is machine-actionable and web-friendly.[2]
Version 2 (also called "Codebook") of the DDI standard has been implemented in the Dataverse data repository and the data archives of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The latest version 3.3 (also called "Lifecycle") of the DDI standard was released in 2020.[3]
Member Institutions
| Institution[4] | Abbr. | Country |
|---|---|---|
| Aristotle Cloud Services Australia | ACSA | Australia |
| Australian Bureau of Statistics | ABS | Australia |
| Centro De Investigaciones Sociológicas | CIS | Spain |
| Colectica | Colectica | US |
| Cornell University | CISER | US |
| Danish Data Archive | DDA | Denmark |
| Data Archiving and Networked Services | DANS | Netherlands |
| Finnish Social Science Data Archive | Finland | |
| German Socio-Economic Panel Study | SOEP | Germany |
| GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences | GESIS | Germany |
| Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University | IQSS | US |
| Institute for the Study of Labor | IZA | Germany |
| Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research | ICPSR | US |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT | US |
| Norwegian Social Science Data Services | NSD | Norway |
| Open Data Foundation | ||
| Princeton University | US | |
| Research Data Centre of the German Federal Employment Agency, Institute for Employment Research | IAB | Germany |
| Roper Center for Public Opinion Research | US | |
| Stanford University | US | |
| Survey Research Operations, University of Michigan | US | |
| Swedish National Data Service | SND | Sweden |
| Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences | FORS | Swiss |
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Associate Member) | US | |
| UK Data Archive | UKHLS/BHPS | UK |
| University of Alberta | Canada | |
| University of California | UCDATA | US |
| University of Guelph | Canada | |
| University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center | MPC | US |
| University of Toronto Scholars Portal | Canada | |
| University of Washington, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology | CSDE | US |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute on Aging | MIDUS | US |
| World Bank, Development Data Group | DECDG | US |
See also
References
External links
- DDI Project
Related software/tools
- Colectica
- CSM's XCONVERT
- IHSN Microdata Management Toolkit
- Nesstar Publisher (development was discontinued and Nesstar reached end-of-life status in 2022)
- SDA to XML
- SPSSOMS2DDI
- The Dataverse Project
- Scholars Portal's Dataverse Data Explorer v.2
- Rich Data Services.
