Progress with the CESSDA Euro Question Bank Project

Survey questions of different datasets in different languages from the CESSDA Service Providers will be the content of the Euro Question Bank (EQB). The project develops and implements a central search facility across all these CESSDA surveys. The EQB metadata schema is based on the DDI-Lifecycle metadata standard and provides conversion mappings from other metadata standards, such as DDI-Codebook. The software architecture consists of two main parts, the EQB-Frontend and the EQB-Backend. The EQB-Frontend is implemented with Vaadin as the user interface technology for interacting between different web services.

The EQB-Backend comprises different technologies, such as Elastic Search, Open Source Metadata Harvester (OSMH), etc. Elastic search is a search engine for indexing metadata and is used by EQB with a JSON format. The aim of OSMH is to harvest all information from heterogeneous and autonomous repository handlers with different technologies. It classifies the entities and objects to be harvested and enables repository owners to write their own repository handlers for the technology they use. The presentation will introduce into the EQB prototype application and the EQB architecture, focusing on the current work in progress.