[DDI-SRG] Bugs mentioned in DDI Best Practices

[Mary Vardigan]

In going through the Best Practice documents, I noted annotations about
the following bugs. Not sure if they are already entered in Mantis.
-Mary

 

(1) The versioning practices and structure of the maintaining
organization should be recorded in the description of the Organization
within the Organization scheme. Currently, there is no specific location
or element for the information. It is strongly recommended that a Note
of type VersionStructure be created within the description of the
Organization. All DDI Instances require a reference to this organization
which insures that information on the version structure will be relayed
to the end user.

 

(2) Users need to know when major reviews and versioning take place and
when they will be available through publication. Both versioning
schedules and a publication schedule (if different from the versioning
schedule) should be provided in the metadata. There is currently not a
specific location for this information in the resource package, and so
it should be included in the abstract.

 

(3) When an instance is published for the purpose of reuse or reference,
the publisher should indicate this as a means of ensuring the user of
the intent to persist the metadata. This is currently not an available
feature of DDI and should be listed in the Purpose statement of the
Resource Package (see discussion of isPublished in discussion section
below). A bug has been filed on the current DDI structure to add a
"final" flag to differentiate between a set of metadata packaged for
publication (actually published) as opposed to packaged for internal
development. Discussion focused on both the desirability of such a flag
and the fact that what it was really indicating was whether the packaged
metadata had been officially published. A comment will be filed on this
bug suggesting that a more accurate flag would isPublished with a
Boolean value of true indicating that the metadata has been officially
published and that any future changes would be reflected in a version
change. 

 

(4)  If a study contains a standard weight this should be entered as a
numeric value in weighting. It is to be expected that future versions of
the standard will have a machine-actionable home for the standard
weight.

 

Mary Vardigan

Assistant Director, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social
Research (ICPSR)

Phone: 734-615-7908

Fax: 734-647-8200

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