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DataForge : A DDI-Enabled Toolkit for Researchers and Data Managers

DataForge : A DDI-Enabled Toolkit for Researchers and Data Managers. Arofan Gregory Pascal Heus J Gager Metadata Technology North America. An Observation…. DDI is a complex standard It has to be, to support the management of sometimes complex data

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DataForge : A DDI-Enabled Toolkit for Researchers and Data Managers

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  1. DataForge: A DDI-Enabled Toolkit for Researchers and Data Managers Arofan Gregory Pascal Heus J Gager Metadata Technology North America

  2. An Observation… • DDI is a complex standard • It has to be, to support the management of sometimes complex data • The organizations who use DDI have the capacity to handle the complexity • Training staff in the standard • Implementing IT tools • Organizing and migrating metadata

  3. What About Researchers? • It is unrealistic to expect researchers to expend the same effort to learn and use a standard • But unless researchers are using DDI, the work has to be done by the archives and libraries where they deposit their data • Most research projects have lots of different proprietary tools, databases, and formats • The data is not easy to re-use across software packages

  4. A Solution to This problem • DataForge is a simple tool for performing useful tasks for researchers and data managers • It does not require any knowledge of DDI • Simple, command-line interface

  5. Two Packages For mining metadata out of proprietary formats, expressing it in standard formats, generating summary statistics, and creating imports and set-ups For generating reports and codebooks in PDF and HTML

  6. Sledgehammer Functionality • DataForge can read SAS Script plus ASCII, SPSS, and Stata files, DDI plus ASCII, and StatTransfer plus ASCII • The metadata is mined out of these formats and can be exported as DDI 1.0/2.1, 2.5, and 3.1 • Also supports Triple-S (in future, SDMX support is planned)

  7. Sledgehammer Functionality (2) • Can generate summary statistics from the data (include min, max, average, standard deviation, missing count, weighted/unweighted frequencies) • Can generate scripts for reading data into SAS, SPSS, and Stata • Can generate SQL for relational data bases (MySQL, Oracle, MS-SQL, Vertica) • Creates database schema • Loads ASCII data • Can run as an interactive command line, or in batch mode

  8. Caelum • Provides a simple XSLT-based tool for generating codebooks and quality reports from DDI metadata • Outputs include HTML and PDF • Runs with a single command line • “Template” transformations can be modified • Custom XSLT can be used

  9. Demo

  10. Planned Release and Licensing • DataForge tools are available as freeware, to be released in the spring of 2012 (IASSIST is the target) • We are also starting a beta program for a professional release of Sledgehammer • We are looking for interested beta-testers • Long-term plans are to make DataForge tools available as software-as-a-service (SaaS) • Currently only stand-alone • Will be integrated with the OpenMetadata.org site

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