New CESSDA Vocabulary Service has been launched
The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) has launched a new service for controlled vocabularies. CESSDA Vocabulary Service (CVS) allows users to browse, search and download published vocabularies in different formats and languages. The service also provides an API.
The service also provides an editor where vocabularies are created, edited, versioned and translated. Access to the editor is restricted and governed by specific user roles. For example, translator roles are agency and language specific.
Most European data archives use the international DDI documentation standard for describing research data in their holdings. Controlled vocabularies form an important element in this standard. The CESSDA Vocabulary Service has been created in close collaboration with the DDI Alliance, and the Alliance also uses the editor for managing its own vocabularies. CESSDA or assoaciated organisations have translated the DDI vocabularies included in the CESSDA metadata model into eight different languages.
FSD participated actively in developing the user interfaces of the Vocabulary Service from the user perspective, together with UK Data Service and Swedish National Data Service. The coding was done in Germany by GESIS. At present, FSD acts as the main content and access administrator for the tool, granting access rights, training the 20+ translators and giving user support.