GESIS Service Infrastructure - DDI along the way

To document an empirical survey for understanding, findability and re-use several steps are necessary. In our case we start with an existing statistical file containing the survey data. The documentation starts with importing variable names and labels, answer codes and categories using R and storing these informations in corresponding DDI 3.2 Lifecycle elements using the DDI-FlatDB.

In addition variable statistics e.g. in form of frequency tables can be automatically created and stored. Next step is to newly enter or connect an existing questionnaire using the questionnaire editor. After these steps a deep documentation on variable level will be possible through a variable editor incl. connecting controlled vocabularies using the CESSDA CV manager. Furthermore we will integrate a table generator, to create more sophisticated cross-reference, frequency or descriptive tables. For more specific tables, we integrate direct R script handling via RServe.

In this presentation we will describe the planed architecture, tools and editors. All planed services are implemented to be collaborative, multilingual web applications and directly support multilinguality on the documentation level. Search and browse of study- and variable-level is provided within the ExploreData project.