Wealth of Metadata with DDI

Documentation of research data across the research data lifecycle requires metadata at several stages. The DDI metadata standard provides several products across the data lifecycle to facilitate the capture and use of structured metadata. DDI products allow for both human- and machine-interactions with the documentation. They include DDI-Codebook for entry-level cataloguing; DDI-Lifecycle and Controlled Vocabularies for reusability and more sophisticated descriptions of surveys, questions and instruments; the XKOS extension to the Simple Knowledge Organization System for rich conceptual metadata; and the Structured Data Transformation Language (SDTL) for provenance. In addition, DDI-Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) is a leading-edge product intended to fill the emerging need for integration of data from different disciplinary domains such as health or environmental sciences. The poster will show how the DDI products work together and contribute to researcher’s needs for high quality documentation and data and metadata re-use.