2015 Work Plan

The scope of the 2015 Work Plan was the allocation of work to Service Providers. Initially, twelve separate tasks were proposed for the work plan and five of them were selected for funding and are currently running (some of them beyond 2016).

CESSDA Technical Framework

The project is led by UKDS and involves four other CESSDA Service Providers in partnership (NSD, DANS, SND, and GESIS). The ambition of this project is to promote good software development practice across the Service Provider community, in respect of the provision of CESSDA products and services. Furthermore, it will ensure that the source code for every product is centrally available, so that all Service Providers can access it, thus increasing the options for maintaining and extending the various products, whilst protecting CESSDA’s investment in the production of the given products. The publication of basic standards for source code quality will ensure Service Providers know what is expected of them.

CESSDA Data Access Policy

Both the existing CESSDA Statutes and the proposed Statutes for the CESSDA ERIC require CESSDA to have a Data Access Policy. The CESSDA Data Access Policy will be one of the foundational operation documents for the consortium and a highly significant statement of intent for CESSDA as it should demonstrate the consortium’s commitment to both open science and to the fullest protection of the privacy of subjects and the rights of the data owners. The key ambition for the project led by UKDS is to provide a unified policy framework for CESSDA’s data and metadata access policies. The policy framework will reference internationally recognised protocols, standards, and license conditions and will be developed in the course of 2016.

CESSDA Metadata Management

The goal of this project, led by FSD, is to produce the CESSDA Metadata Standards Portfolio. It will be standards-based and cover study-level metadata and variable/question-level metadata and support multilingual searches and data discovery, reflecting the needs of both Service Providers and researchers. This project will deliver a Phase 1 product, the CESSDA Metadata Standards Portfolio, and identify the areas of where further work is needed (suggested Phase 2). The Portfolio Version will cover the most urgent needs and first and foremost support building the Product and Service Catalogue and the Euro Question Bank.

CESSDA Open Source Metadata Harvester

The ambition of this project led by NSD is to produce an easy to use metadata harvesting service that has a plugin architecture for inputs and outputs, so that a wide range of metadata sources can be harvested and data in a variety of metadata standards (including the Metadata Management Standard defined by the Metadata Management task) can be emitted. It will be administered using existing Open Source tools, in order to reduce development and ongoing maintenance costs (compared to building a bespoke administration User Interface). The benefits to the CESSDA Research Infrastructure are that by providing the metadata harvester as a service means it is distributed (available to all) and borderless (location independent) and authorised clients at any location can use it. Also the Open Source approach enables extensibility and maintainability, with both Service Providers and others able to enhance the core and create new plugins. This is a very cost-effective means of promoting sustainability.

CESSDA Expert Seminar 2015

DANS organised the CESSDA Expert Seminar 2015 on 30 November – 1 December in The Hague, The Netherlands, in cooperation with FSD, GESIS and UKDS. The aim of this seminar was twofold: creating awareness and knowledge of trust issues in general, and exchanging and developing ideas on unresolved trust issues (non-DSA Annex 2 obligations, CESSDA Trust Support Working Group). The intention was to create awareness and knowledge of trust issues generally and, more in particular, to exchange and develop ideas on how to solve some of the issues in the field of trustworthy digital repositories for the social sciences. These contain questions on how to put into effect the obligations of the Service Providers in the “Annex 2 to the CESSDA statutes” and what tasks a CESSDA Trust Support Working Group should perform.

Next section: CESSDA Working groups