Gerrit de Bolster September 24, 2013 Generating Blaise from DDI

What is DDI?  On the web page of the DDI Alliance the following definition is found: “The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an effort to create an international standard for describing data from the social, behavioural, and economic sciences.”  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The DDI is an international project to create a standard for information describing statistical and social science data (i.e., metadata). The DDI specification, written in XML, provides a format for content, exchange, and preservation of information.” 2

Where is DDI used? 3 Gerrit

Why should we use DDI?  DDI is an open standard expressed in the global supported standard XML  Since version 3 the concept of a data collection instrument was introduced  Using DDI for defining a data collection instrument opens the way for other organisations (including commercial software vendors) to create solutions  Instrument definitions can be re-used by other organisations 4

DDI fits in a “plug and play” architecture 5 POC

The Proof Of Concept  Create a DDI definition for an instrument  samples available: MQDS, QDT, Colectica, ddialliance.org  Use an existing generator (BLS-Wizard)  add a converter: DDI definition to generator input file  output: BlaiseIS 4.8 CAWI instrument  Create a set of working samples  questionnaire, form, download portal, upload portal 6

A lot of references… 7 Demo

DDI alone is not enough! Technical additions in the POC:  Templates (including basic Menu file, adapted ASP’s/XSLT’s)  Layout definitions (Mode Library -> CSS)  Type & procedure libraries  Lookup data (in the POC a definition in DDI was created)  Etc. What should/could be included in DDI? Do we still speak a little bit Blaise language or include other standards (e.g. MathML, CSS)? 8

DDI instance: Instrument or Blaise?  DDI is not a programming language  The Blaise source language is very rich What is the added value to create a DDI definition for the Blaise source language instead of using Blaise?  DDI aims at supporting a generic meta definition for datacollection instruments Create a generic meta definition for datacollection instruments, not another source language! 9

Lessons learned  DDI is a very open standard. A standard DDI instrument definition is a prerequisite for a successful use in the Blaise community.  DDI is not human readable. An Instrument Design Tool with a repository is a must!  DDI should be a stable open standard, upward compatible. The schemas of a later version (3.2) should still support a definition in an earlier version (3.1). 10

DDI Tooling: what’s next? 11 AA Blaise community working group? AA commercial product? NNo action at all? I'm open for discussion! Any questions? Or answers?

Thank you for your attention! 12