How the Euro Question Bank project makes survey questions available to the social sciences

This presentation will give an overview of how different Data Archives (CESSDA) can import their survey questions with heterogeneous technologies and formats into Euro Question Bank (EQB). The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) Euro Question Bank (EQB) project has implemented a central search facility across all CESSDA survey questions of different datasets in different languages. For this it uses a metadata schema based on the DDI-Lifecycle standard and provides conversion mappings from other metadata standards. All CESSDA service providers can document their contents using those standards with different technologies to supply their survey questions to EQB. The EQB system architecture consists of two main parts, the EQB-Front-end and the EQB-Back-end. The EQB-Front-end is being implemented by Vaadin, a user interface technology for interacting between different web services. The EQB-Back-end comprises different technologies, such as Elasticsearch, Open Source Metadata Harvester (OSMH), etc. Elasticsearch is a search engine used for indexing the JSON format. The Open Source Metadata Harvester (OSMH) is a project by CESSDA to enable harvesting of different formats. It classifies the entities and objects to be harvested and enables repository owners to write their own repository handlers for the technology they use. By providing an easy access to a comprehensive collection of survey questions from studies all over Europe, the Euro Question Bank will contribute to more comparability between past and future survey data within the social sciences.