Because good research needs good data

Sociology

Extensions

CESSDA MLI - Council of European Social Science Data Archives Minimum Level of Information

A common base profile of DDI for use by the member archives of CESSDA.

Tools

DDI on Rails

Server-side software for building a data portal, with a particular focus on survey datasets. It uses DDI to provide access to the data at the level of concepts and variables. For an example of it in use, see the SOEPinfo data portal.

DDI Tools

The Data Documentaion Initiative website's list of tools to implement the DDI standard.

Use Cases

CESSDA Catalogue

Provides a seamless interface to datasets from social science data archives across Europe using the CESSDA MLI profile of DDI.

DDI Projects

The Data Documentation Initiative website's list of projects adopting or encouraging DDI as a standard.

ICPSR - Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

A data archive providing leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community; all metadata conforms to the DDI standard.

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) Data Archive

Provides members of the scholarly community with access to files associated with scholarly studies for the purpose of replication, for all studies conducted by ISPS-affiliated researchers. ISPS metadata records conform to DDI requirements and include a minimal set of Dublin Core metadata elements.

UKDA - UK Data Archive

Curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the United Kingdom, the archive uses DDI as the basis for its catalogue records.

Metadata standards

DDI - Data Documentation Initiative

An international standard for describing data from the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Expressed in XML, the DDI metadata specification supports the entire research data life cycle.