The ODISSEI Portal: Linking Survey and Administrative Data

The ODISSEI Portal will combine metadata from a wide variety of research data repositories into a single interface, allow advanced semantic queries to support findability, and facilitate data access. The project will include metadata of (a) all datasets of Statistics Netherlands, including the metadata of the microdata catalogue, (b) all datasets developed supported by ODISSEI in the Netherlands (EVS, GGP, SHARE, ESS, NTR, HSN, LISS) which predominantly apply DDI standards. The project will also develop a metadata ingestion pipeline to make sure that the Portal can be maintained and kept up to date. This pipeline will be used by the hosting party to add new datasets during and after the end of the project. Currently, existing tools for findability in the social sciences are limited in that they only identify specific terms or synonyms (e.g. United Kingdom question bank or the Question Variable Database). The ODISSEI Portal will extend and improve search functionality by using semantic queries which will enable broader probabilistic matching and link functions over an enriched knowledge graph representation of the FAIR metadata catalogue. This incorporates the context of specific terms which are crucial in social research. By using rich and extensible data structures developed within the linked data community, ODISSEI will evolve the relatively flat metadata catalogues in use today into the highly interlinked and graph-based structures needed to conduct advanced semantic searches