Global social science data exchange: why do we need data and metadata standards?

Louise Corti, Ken Miller

UK Data Archive, United Kingdom

Email address of corresponding author: corti@essex.ac.uk

The UK Data Archive (UKDA) is an internationally-renowned centre of expertise in data acquisition, preservation, dissemination and promotion; and is curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK. Enhanced resource discovery, streamlined and safe data access, user support for secondary use of quantitative and qualitative data, long-term preservation services, and the facilitation of international data exchange represent five areas of ongoing development work for UKDA.

Standards and processes for data preservation, data sharing and exchange underpin these services.

The UKDA is heavily involved in leading the development of emerging standards such as the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) used for world wide data exchange for social scientists, and a qualitative data interchange format. The UKDA aims to pool and share its own resources with that of other organisations in a simple and seamless manner which also addresses the security requirements of the individual organisations and utilising semantic web technologies.

In this paper we will focus on describing a proposed new European data portal, and qualitative data sharing systems based on these emerging standards. International metadata schema and applications will be covered, and we will discuss some of the R&D relating to authentication, linking data to research outputs and text mining applications for qualitative data.