Ron Dekker
Developing a DDI back-office

ron.dekker@nwo.nl

In this presentation we want to report on best practices and pitfalls during the development and construction of a new back office system for metadata.

The release of the DDI-standard encourages standardisation of metadata collection and presentation. For the latter there are front-ends like NESSTAR and WEB-ILSES. For the creation of metadata according to the DDI-standard many archives and data organisations face severe problems in organising their (existing) metadata into a DDI format. Basically, their metadata are stored in a custom-made (relational) database.

At the Dutch Scientific Statistical Agency we developed a new relational database WSADelfi according to DDI-standards, and capable of importing XML-files into the database (e.g. by using SPSS2DDI). Besides capturing the metadata the database also takes care of orderings, secrecy statements, and other administrative data.

Ron Dekker
Scientific Statistical Agency
Dutch Social Science Research Council