With or Without You - Standardised Metadata in Survey Data Management 1 |
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| Coordinator 1 | Mr Knut Wenzig (German Institute for Economic Research - DIW Berlin ) |
| Coordinator 2 | Mr Daniel Bela (LIfBI – Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) |
| Coordinator 3 | Mr Arne Bethmann (Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy) |
With evolving data sources, such as process-generated or user-generated content, meta- and paradata play an increasingly important role in many parts of the data management lifecycle. This is also true for surveys, as they get more complex, and data management relies more on properly defined processes to ensure both data quality and maintainability. In turn, many studies, data providers and data archives have developed systems of structured metadata tailored to their specific data management needs. While some of these systems are (loosely) based on evolving metadata standards like DDI or SDMX, many are custom made solutions. For the goal of making metadata comparable and shareable across studies and institutions this is obviously a less than ideal situation.
In this session we want to discuss the issue from a practitioners view, and want to hear from people who are faced with the challenge of implementing structured metadata systems, or have done so in the past. Particularly, we want to hear about the possible benefits, problems and drawbacks when implementing metadata systems that adhere closely to metadata standards like DDI or SDMX. Possible questions to be discussed would be:
- Which processes would benefit from standardized metadata?
- Are there examples for metadata systems which cover multiple steps within the whole lifecycle?
- Are there sources for shared and reusable metadata?
- Are there tools to process standardized metadata?
- What could be incentives for sharing metadata and tools?