Powerful access to qualitative data: What's behind the UK QualiBank

In this paper we discuss how we have implemented a digital data browsing system for qualitative data based on highly structured data and metadata. Our system also enable paragraph-level citation. The crux of this exciting project has been the incorporation of object and sub-object level metadata using the QuDEx metadata schema in addition to DDI study-level metadata, and using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for encoding textual data. The QuDex schema was initially released in 2006 following a project undertaken by the UK Data Archive and Metadata Technologies. QuDEx enables simple description of collections, data objects, parts of data objects, captures formal relationships between them, and analytical elements such as categories, codes and memos. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has further provided a powerful tool for marking up bodies of text to enable rich web display. We will discuss how we have implemented the DDI, QuDEx and the TEI in the UK Quali Bank browsing system, and describe our use of technologies: an XML database (Base X) to store and deliver both metadata and textual data, and Solr and XQuery for powerful searching.