Status Production Use First published 1996 (1996) | Year started 1995 (1995) Organization DDI Alliance | |
Latest version DDI 3.2May 15, 2014; 2 years ago (2014-05-15) Committee Scientific Board and Technical Committee | ||
The Data Documentation Initiative (also known as DDI or DDI Metadata) 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.
Begun in 1995, the effort brings together data professionals from around the world to develop the standard. The DDI specification, written in XML, provides a format for content, exchange, and preservation of questionnaire and data file information. DDI fills a need related to the challenge of storing and distributing social science metadata, creating an international standard for the design of codebooks. The freely available international DDI standard describes data that result from observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.
Version 2 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. Version 3.2 of the DDI standard was released in 2014.