DDI-Lifecycle 4.0 Beta 1 Overview

The DDI Alliance Technical Committee hosted a Webinar on February 2028, 2024 presenting the recently released DDI-Lifecycle 4.0 Beta 1.

DDI Lifecycle 4.0 is managed using a Model First development approach. Content additions and changes are added to the model and the serialization formats are automatically generated. The metadata content of DDI 3.3 has been converted into the new 4.0 model.

The ddi-lifecycle-4.0-beta.1.zip package includes:

schema.xsd - XML Schema

jsonSchema.json - JSON Schema

ddi4.xmi - OMG's UML XMI 2.5

ddi4.owl - RDF OWL (closed with restrictions)

ddi4.owl.ttl - RDF OWL (open)

ddi4.shex - ShEx

ddi4.shacl- SHACL

Other formats are also available but are not included in the official release. The beta package is available at: https://github.com/ddialliance/ddimodel/releases

The documentation for DDI Lifecycle 4.0 is also autogenerated from the model, and can be viewed at: https://ddialliance.github.io/ddimodel-web/

The Technical Committee is looking for feedback on the community's preference between the different OWL serializations and general comments about the XML and JSON. One version of the OWL models restrictions, the other is open and uses RDF shape languages to define rules. Ordering of lists in the OWL is handled using normal predicate relations combined with the addition of enumerable slots with index positions to keep the vocabularies in OWL-DL, we would like to hear the community's feedback on this approach to ordering as shown in the Sequence item type.

You can provide questions and comments back using the github issues with a free github account at: https://github.com/ddialliance/ddimodel/issues