DDI Cross-Domain Integration (DDI-CDI): Complementing the DDI Product Suite

This webinar, held on 3 October 2024, was intended to help DDI member organizations prepare for the upcoming vote on the release of DDI-CDI 1.0 as a new product, and to help others in the community understand how the proposed DDI-CDI specification will augment the DDI suite of products. DDI-CDI was designed to extend DDI metadata to describe data coming from outside the traditional social, behavioral and economic domain, requiring that additional capabilities be realized. These include the description of event and sensor data ("long" data), key-value data ("big" data and no-SQL data) and multi-dimensional data. These data descriptions combine with the traditional "wide" (or "rectangular") DDI data descriptions to allow for the management and production of integrated data sets from dissimilar sources. In a world where cross-domain and multi-disciplinary research is becoming more common, this is an important capability. Further, DDI-CDI provides for the description of generic processes, so that the steps needed for any specific integration can be documented. Because of the different technologies and standards used within other domains, DDI-CDI is designed to work directly with many other "web" standards, using either XML or RDF-based syntax representations. As a result, DDI-CDI has become popular within the FAIR implementation community for cross-domain data sharing.

This webinar provided an overview of the features of DDI-CDI and how it complements DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle, and described some of the early implementation cases for data and process description within the DDI and FAIR communities.

I. Introduction and Overview (Arofan Gregory, Chair, DDI-CDI Working Group)
II. The Data Product Builder: DDI-CDI implementation at UKDA (Darren Bell, UKDA)
III. Describing Data Integration and Process: ESS and Climate Data for EOSB and WorldFAIR (Benjamin Beuster/Hilde Orten, Sikt)
IV. Open Discussion