DDI 4 - The Potential as a Metadata Standard for Cross-Domain Research Data

The DDI Alliance released a prototype of DDI 4. DDI 4 is a large UML model library for describing research and other data. Subsets of the library--called views--are provided for specific user perspectives. Encodings in other technologies, XML Schema and OWL/RDF, are available as well. DDI 4 has potential as a metadata standard for cross-domain research data. Large parts of DDI 4 are independent from the social science domain. Especially in the areas of data description, conceptual, and workflows (for process description), DDI 4 will be useful for a cross-domain approach. The DDI 4 data description is based on two powerful techniques: first, the datum-based approach which enables the description of data in many forms (also data lakes and legacy forms); second, the variable cascade which links conceptual definitions down to the instance variable. The presentation will focus on the above mentioned features in the context of cross-domain use cases, and will describe the current status of DDI 4 development after a public review of the DDI 4 prototype release