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

DataForge is a simple command-line interface tool for researchers and data managers to perform tasks such as mining metadata, generating summary statistics, and creating reports in standard formats. It supports various proprietary formats and can export metadata as DDI, Triple-S, and future support for SDMX. The tool is planned for release as freeware in 2012 with a professional release of Sledgehammer. Beta testers are welcome, and long-term plans include making DataForge available as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

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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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