Poster presentation at North American DDI (NADDI) Conference, held in Edmonton, Alberta, CA on April 7, 2016.

Ben Perry (Cornell/NCRN) presents joint work with Venkata Kambhampaty, Kyle Brumsted, Lars Vilhuber, & William C. Block at NADDI 2015.

We describe the design, implementation, and deployment of the Comprehensive Extensible Data Documentation and Access Repository (CED(2)AR). This is a metadata repository system that allows researchers to search, browse, access, and cite confidential data and metadata through either a web-based user interface or programmatically through a search API, all the while re-reusing and linking to existing archive and provider generated metadata. CED(2)AR is distinguished from other metadata repository-based applications due to requirements that derive from its social science context. These include the need to cloak confidential data and metadata and manage complex provenance chains.

Social science researchers increasingly make use of data that is confidential because it contains linkages to the identities of people, corporations, etc. The value of this data lies in the ability to join the identifiable entities with external data, such as genome data, geospatial information, and the like. However, the confidentiality of this data is a barrier to its utility and curation, making it difficult to fulfil US federal data management mandates and interfering with basic scholarly practices, such as validation and reuse of existing results. We describe the complexity of the relationships among data that span a public and private divide. We then describe our work on the CED2AR prototype, a first step in providing researchers with a tool that spans this divide and makes it possible for them to search, access and cite such data.

Provenance is a key component of evaluating the integrity and reusability of data for scholarship. While recording and providing access provenance has always been important, it is even more critical in the web environment in which data from distributed sources and of varying integrity can be combined and derived. The PROV model, developed under the auspices of the W3C, is a foundation for semantically-rich, interoperable, and web-compatible provenance metadata. We report on the results of our experimentation with integrating the PROV model into the DDI metadata for a complex, but characteristic, example social science data. We also present some preliminary thinking on how to visualize those graphs in the user interface.

We develop the core of a method for solving the data archive and curation problem that confronts the custodians of restricted-access research data and the scientific users of such data. Our solution recognizes the dual protections afforded by physical security and access limitation protocols. It is based on extensible tools and can be easily incorporated into existing instructional materials.

Presentation at the 4th Annual European DDI User Conference (EDDI12), Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Bergen, Norway, 3 December, 2012

Poster presentation at the 2nd Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) Summit of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in Denver, Colorado (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/RDAP11/) on March 31, 2011.