An Operationalized DDI Infrastructure to Document, Publish, Preserve and Search Social Science Research Data

Abstract

The social sciences are here in a very privileged position, as there is already an existing meta-data standard defined by the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) to document research data such as empirical surveys. But even so the DDI standard already exists since the year 2000, it is not widely used because there are almost no (open source) tools available. In this article we present our technical infrastructure to operationalize DDI, to use DDI as living standard for documentation and preservation and to support the publishing process and search functions to foster re-use and research. The main contribution of this paper is to present our DDI architecture, to showcase how to operationalize DDI and to show the efficient and effective handling and usage of complex meta-data. The infrastructure can be adopted and used as blueprint for other domains.