CLOSER’s Data Management Network provides a forum for knowledge sharing, training and discussion related to the practical implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and metadata standards. The ‘Metadata management in the real world’ webinar series showcases invited guest speakers utilising these standards with real world applications.
Videos and slides from previous webinars can be found below.
Previous webinars
September 2022: DDI Tools – Managing metadata quality at CLOSER
In this webinar, the CLOSER Discovery team (Jon Johnson, Jenny Li, William Norley, and Becky Oldroyd) showcased a selection of our current and in-development tools, which enable CLOSER and our partners to collaborate efficiently.
Managing questionnaire metadata using Archivist: Becky Oldroyd
Archivist is CLOSER’s open-source DDI questionnaire editor which allows us to add questionnaire metadata to CLOSER Discovery: the UK’s most detailed search platform for longitudinal population studies. In this presentation, Becky Oldroyd (CLOSER Metadata Officer), describes what Archivist is and why it was developed, along with highlighting some key features of Archivist that allow for the production of high-quality questionnaire metadata.
Work-flow Automation: Jenny Li
In this presentation, Jenny Li (CLOSER Metadata Developer), explores using continuous integration tools for quality assurance of workflows.
Dashboard Tool: William Norley
In this presentation, William Norley (CLOSER Metadata Developer), discusses the Dashboard tool which enables CLOSER to manage and quality assure free text fields used in CLOSER Discovery before publication.
Extract2DDI: Jon Johnson
In this presentation, Jon Johnson (CLOSER Technical Lead) outlines a new tool under development at CLOSER to extract metadata from SPSS and Stata files into the DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle metadata standards.
October 2021: ESRC Future Data Services
Part of the ESRC’s Future Data Services programme is looking into how to fund data services beyond 2024. This webinar saw Richard Welpton (ESRC Head of Data Services) introduce the Future Data Services programme before delegates were given the opportunity to ask questions and contribute ideas on potential priorities for the ESRC.
February 2021: Enhanced data services with structured metadata
Rich Data Services: Pascal Heus & Andrew DeCarlo (Metadata Technology)
The presentation focused on Rich Data Services (RDS), an innovative platform from Metadata Technology North America aiming to the delivery of data as a service. Features include: an industry standard REST based API, concurrent access to data and metadata, web-based applications for exploring, tabulating, or downloading the data, and much more. RDS aims to empowering information systems, reducing data wrangling, and overall modernising data publication and access. It broadly serves data producers, data scientists, traditional researchers, application developers, and casual users.
Smart Energy Research Laboratory – Darren Bell (UK Data Service)
This presentation focused on the Smart Energy Research Lab (SERL) a five-year consortium project between the UK Data Archive and University College London. The presentation described how they have approached storing cross-disciplinary data at scale using a variety of data models including wide column store and property graph on a Hadoop platform. During the talk, Darren considered some of the challenges in treating data at the data point level and how going forward, this can support a “domain agnostic” and truly interoperable approach to subsetting variable data and generating bespoke data products in real time form sources as diverse as IoT meter data and “traditional” social science surveys.
September 2020: Questionnaire development and data collection
The Questionnaire Design and Documentation Tool (QDDT): a tool for developing questions and documenting the design process – Hilde Orten (NSD)
The presentation from NSD will focus how the QDDT can be used, to develop questions that are aimed to be fielded across the different countries, using examples from the ESS. Focus will be put on how QDDT can be used to create questions based on research concepts, and how the development of questions can be managed and documented. Ideas for how content from the QDDT in future may be used in a translation tool, and for documenting variables of the ESS international data set will also be shared.
An overview of the development and fielding of questionnaires using Colectica and DDI at CSO Ireland – Ciara Cummins (CSO-Ireland)
The presentation from CSO-Ireland will focus on how they have centralised the development of questions and the production of questionnaires using Colectica software to enable reusability, standardisation and to help improve the quality and processes across statistical outputs.