PREPARING AND PUBLISHING METADATA Tools and procedures Vipavc Brvar Irena, ADP, Slovenia CESSDA - Seminar, October, 2005

Efficiency: Metadata authoring is time-consuming. Methods to save time and increase efficiency are therefore important. This includes automation of processes and methods to avoid unnecessary repetition of tasks. Import: Most data sources have some sort machine- readable documentation. An efficient metadata authoring tool should be able to capture this information and put it into the DDI structure Write once – use many: Once you have a metadata instance describing your data you should be able to use it for many purposes (like producing data files for different statistical packages

Data/metadata integration: An efficient and flexible metadata authoring tool should be able to handle the data as well as the metadata (integrity checking, automatic creation of summary statistics and frequencies etc.) Simplicity: Metadata authoring is often done by persons with limited technological skills. The tools should thus be designed for none-experts.

Different sources will give you different parts of the DDI. spss, sas, stata pdf text codebook XML html database Excel delimited text Blaise DDI Study info Categories Quest. text Locations Freq Vargrps Process the different sources and assemble/merge the result Nesstar pdf2text Textpad Word HTMLPad

PDF2Text is a plug-in conversion tool for Acrobat which is used to convert your PDF documents into plain text ascii files. Options are available to output page numbers, paragraph formatting, horizontal formatting, vertical formatting, page range extraction, character spacing per inch, sorting of text, text tolerance level override for varying sizes of text, automatic loading and saving of configurations & many other features.

View -Plain text -Tags on -Normal -Page Preview

View -Plain text -Tags on -Normal -Page Preview Structure view Validate document (using defined DTD) Validation log

View -Plain text -Tags on -Normal -Page Preview Structure view Attribute inspector Element list Validate document (using defined DTD) Validation log

Attributes and elements

View -Plain text -Tags on -Normal -Page Preview Structure view Attribute inspector Element list Insert: -Element -Entity Reference -Comment -Special Characters -Symbols Validate document (using defined DTD) Validation log Macros

Drawback – Not in typical skillset

- Import of data from a variety of formats (SPSS, SAS, Statistica, Stata etc.) - Data metadata integration facilitating integrity checking as well as automatic creation of summary statistics. - Powerful metadata editing capabilities: - Tools for efficient entering of information for multiple variables. - Tools for efficient creation of the variable group hierarchies - A category set repository supporting efficient reuse of variable metadata within and across datasets NESSTAR

- Template driven interface supporting the development and freezing of local best practices, selection of obligatory elements, local controlled vocabularies etc) - Export of data to a variety of formats NESSTAR

The variable info screen

Entering of study-level metadata

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It ease some of the work.. Hard to import new add-ins

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