Data Documentation Initiative

The Data Documentation Initiative (also known as DDI) is an international standard for describing surveys, questionnaires, statistical data files, and social sciences study-level information. This information is described as metadata by the standard.

DDI Metadata Standard

Data Documentation Initiative Metadata Standard
DDI
Abbreviation	DDI
Status	Production Use
Year started	1995 (1995)
First published	1996 (1996)
Latest version	DDI 3.3 April 15, 2020; 5 years ago (2020-04-15)
Organization	DDI Alliance
Committee	Scientific Board and Technical Committee
Related standards	XML
Domain	Questionnaires Metadata Standard Statistical survey
License	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Website	ddialliance.org

Begun in 1995,^[1] the effort brings together data professionals from around the world to develop the standard. The DDI specification, most often expressed in XML, provides a format for content, exchange, and preservation of questionnaire and data file information. DDI supports the description, storage, and distribution of social science data, creating an international specification that is machine-actionable and web-friendly.^[2]

Version 2 (also called "Codebook") of the DDI standard has been implemented in the Dataverse data repository and the data archives of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The latest version 3.3 (also called "Lifecycle") of the DDI standard was released in 2020.^[3]

Member Institutions

Institution[4]	Abbr.	Country
Aristotle Cloud Services Australia	ACSA	Australia
Australian Bureau of Statistics	ABS	Australia
Centro De Investigaciones Sociológicas	CIS	Spain
Colectica	Colectica	US
Cornell University	CISER	US
Danish Data Archive	DDA	Denmark
Data Archiving and Networked Services	DANS	Netherlands
Finnish Social Science Data Archive		Finland
German Socio-Economic Panel Study	SOEP	Germany
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences	GESIS	Germany
Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University	IQSS	US
Institute for the Study of Labor	IZA	Germany
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research	ICPSR	US
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	MIT	US
Norwegian Social Science Data Services	NSD	Norway
Open Data Foundation
Princeton University		US
Research Data Centre of the German Federal Employment Agency, Institute for Employment Research	IAB	Germany
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research		US
Stanford University		US
Survey Research Operations, University of Michigan		US
Swedish National Data Service	SND	Sweden
Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences	FORS	Swiss
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Associate Member)		US
UK Data Archive	UKHLS/BHPS	UK
University of Alberta		Canada
University of California	UCDATA	US
University of Guelph		Canada
University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center	MPC	US
University of Toronto Scholars Portal		Canada
University of Washington, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology	CSDE	US
University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute on Aging	MIDUS	US
World Bank, Development Data Group	DECDG	US

See also

• Colectica
• Metadata standards