In 2001 the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) published its first version of the DDI standard. Developed by an international group of metadata professionals from archives, research organizations, and statistical agencies, the DDI sought to provide a format of structured documentation that would facilitate, access, distribution, preservation, and the intelligent use of data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. Initially focused on description, the standard has expanded to encompass metadata reuse within and between organizations, and support metadata driven systems from concept to analysis. Over the years DDI has expanded from a single product, the descriptive DDI Codebook, to a suite of products focused on the needs of several communities. DDI Lifecycle, a significant expansion of DDI Codebook that includes metadata reuse, addresses the needs of data producing organizations, such as national statistical offices. Recent additions include XKOS, an RDF vocabulary to manage and publish Statistical Classifications, SDTL to capture data processing steps in a non-proprietary language that can be used within DDI products and other systems, and Cross Domain Integration (CDI) which focuses on the metadata needed to programmatically integrate data for multiple domains.

This panel presents on the applied use of various DDI products by Statistical Agencies to support a range of activities from capturing the descriptive metadata needed to support the accurate use and sharing of survey and census data, manage conceptual content for consistency and quality, and the development and fielding of questionnaires. Discussion will center on issues arising during the applied use of DDI products in different situations, and the development of DDI as driven by the current and potential user community. 
Topics to be discussed include:
- Introduction to the DDI Suite of products focusing on the high-level coverage model and applications for the various products, including current work on improved translation of content between products and new implementation languages;
- Use of DDI Codebook at the World Bank, internally and in its technical assistance program, and development of DDI-based tools for improved data discoverability, usability, and accessibility;
- DDI-powered production process at Insee that covers three quarters of Insee's surveys and produces around one million questionnaires each year, and testing the use of DDI for the automation of the survey process and for the ingestion of administrative data;
- DDI Lifecycle, and portions of the draft DDI CDI, use at the BLS to guide the development of metadata systems;
- Metadata-driven data gateway at Statistics Estonia to collect data from public data registers, from the description of data at the variable level to the description of data sets stored in databases, and from the description of the raw data to the description of the output data Cubes;
- Integrated metadata ecosystem at Statistics Canada spanning metadata capture, management and reuse across the statistical business process;

Organiser: Dr Flavio Rizzolo 

Chair: Ms Wendy Thomas 

Speaker: Olivier Dupriez 

Speaker: Chantal Vaillancourt 

Speaker: Eric Sigaud 

Speaker: Dan Gillman 

Speaker:  Mrs Kaia Kulla