Another Aspect of Psychometrics; Survey Meta-data Description by XML

Abstract

Descriptions of metadata have been separately maintained from the body of data in survey research. Metadata are usually described on papers or electrical texts that can not be handled by systematic way. One reason for this problem is the lack of methods for organizing documents. Markup languages can support convenient description of documents. This feature attracts attentions of the researchers in this field. Especially markup descriptions for code-books bring the following advantages for survey research. A standardized definition of the document structures gives a common format, and enables uniform handling. The code-book that is described in markup language can represent relevance and references in the data. It makes automatic computing easy. A project in ICPSR, Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), proposed a standard schema for code-books. The major concern of DDI is in the description of bibliographical aspect of survey data. It is similar to library indexes. A potential of DDI code-books is not limited to this aspect. There is larger availability for data analysis. Here after, we call DDI code-books as simply “DDI”. DDI is described in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is a markup language suitable for the use on Internet, and beginning to spread as an international standard. Moreover, various related technologies are developed for XML.