The fourth meeting between European users of DDI has been held in Bergen. On the agenda was, among other things, a new version of DDI as well as an ongoing effort to improve the support for qualitative data.
DDI is a metadata standard for documentation of quantitative and qualitative data during a projects full lifecycle, from research idea to archiving and to the re-usage of data. The new version of DDI, which will be released soon for review, is the DDI version 3.2. There aren’t very many major changes, so the users will be familiar with most of it.
Johan Fihn, system developer at SND, explains that the review consists of a beta test of DDI 3.2. The beta test is done to detect any bugs in the system. Not until sometime next year the complete new version will be launched.
The ongoing work of improving the descriptions of the qualitative data in DDA was also discussed at the meeting in Bergen. This project is not ready to be incorporated in DDI 3.2, instead, it will be included in any of the later revisions of the standard.
Next year’s EDDI-meeting will be held in Paris, 3-4 December. During 2013, a newly developed network for North American DDI-users (NADDI) will have their first meeting. This meeting will be held in Kansas Union at the University of Kansas, 2-3 April.