A metadata specification for the social and behavioral sciences
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. DDI is a free standard that can document and manage different stages in the research data lifecycle, such as conceptualization, collection, processing, distribution, discovery, and archiving. Documenting data with DDI facilitates understanding, interpretation, and use -- by people, software systems, and comp
DDI can help with many types of tasks, including development of interactive codebooks, searchable data catalogs for discovery, question banks, concordances, harmonization and comparison projects, longitudinal data management systems, and more.