The Evolving Best Practices of DDI in Canada

Sharing of data has become the norm in academia, thus requiring an infrastructure to manage it. As there are different platforms across which they are shared, interoperability is critical to ensure continued collaboration and data sharing across disciplines and institutions. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard will be examined regarding its use in Ontario universities and the Microdata Access programs at Statistics Canada. The development and current state of Best Practices and tools to ensure collaboration among the different institutions marking up data will be reviewed, including how the shared infrastructure has reduced the cost of data staging and vastly improved data access not only to our local communities of users, but also to user communities nationally and internationally. Nonetheless, challenges do still exist and these are mentioned as well as potential solutions. Finally, we will discuss the evolving state of best practices and suggest ways to move forward with the partnership of those responsible for tagging datasets.