The Data Documentation Initiative: 
A Report on the Development and Current Status of the DDI

Presented at the CESSDA Expert Seminar,
Tampere, Finland
September 1-2, 2000

Peter Joftis
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
426 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734 998 9915 (telephone)
734 998 9905 (FAX)
joftis@umich.edu

Key Web sites mention:

Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)

The Data Documentation Initiative main web site: HTTP://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/ 

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards

World Wide Web Consortium: the source for the XML, XSL, XLink/XPointer , RDF specifications used or considered for use in the DDI DTD:  HTTP://www.w3c.org

Other Useful Sites with Pointers to Good Resources

Robin Cover’s resources page at OASIS.org: http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ 

Steve Pepper’s list of tools: http://www.infotek.no/sgmltool/guide.htm

XML Software  has a list of tools  http://www.xmlsoftware.com/

Tools for Creating and Working with XML documents

EMACS editor with PSGML major mode, from Lennart Staflin , Lysator, Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden:   http://www.lysator.liu.se/projects/about_psgml.html

Author/Editor from SoftQuad, Inc., Toronto, Canada (obsolete).

XMetal from SoftQuad, Inc., Toronto, Canada (US$495):   HTTP://www.softquad.com

XML Spy, Icon Information Systems, Wien, Austria (US$149):   http://www.xmlspy.com/xml_editor.html

Web based Discovery and Analysis tools that use or are considering using the DDI DTD:

The following projects use the proposed DTD, have been involved in the development of the DTD, have been beta testers of the DTD or are planning to implement the DTD at least as an interchange format.

Federal Electronic Research and Review Extraction Tool (FERRET), U.S. Bureau of the Census in collaboration with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other
Statistical agencies  (http://ferret.bls.census.gov/) 

GRETA U.S. Census Data Access System, University of Minnesota (HTTP://www.socsci.umn.edu/PDAS/system_design.html) 

Networked Social Science Tools and Resources, UK Data Archive, Norwegian Social Science Data Archive, and the Danish Data Archive (http://www.nesstar.org/ )

Statistical Data Collection, University of Virginia Library: (HTTP://quincy.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/dlbin/loader.pl?id=2717)

Sociology Workbench (SWB), EdCenter for Computational Science and Engineering, San Diego State University  (http://edcenter.sdsu/edu/)

Survey Documentation and Analysis
(SDA), Computer Survey Methods Program
(CSM), University of California at Berkeley (http://csa.berkeley.edu )

Virtual Data Center Project  (VDC), Harvard-MIT Data Center (http://thedata.org )

Related Projects

Tool for the Analysis and Documentation of Electronic Questionnaires (TADEQ): http://neon.vb.cbs.nl/rsm/tadeq/default.htm

Central Bureaus of Statistics, Netherlands, TADEQ and Meta-architecture project: http://neon.vb.cbs.nl/rsm/research.htm