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DDI-Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI)

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  7. DDI-Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI)

CODATA’s partnership with the DDI Alliance on DDI-CDI is an important element of our strategic priority ‘Making Data Work for Cross-domain Grand Challenges’

DDI-CDI is a model-driven, domain- and technology-neutral metadata specification designed to facilitate the combination of data from diverse sources and across disciplines. 

DDI-CDI Version 1.0 was released by the DDI Alliance in January 2025 after many years of development. It is incorporated into the Integration Profile of the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF).

DDI-CDI includes three key features to facilitate the combination and integration of data from diverse sources and domains and the machine execution of that process:

  1. information about variables (the ‘variable cascade’);
  2. information about data structure; and
  3. information about provenance and processing. 

DDI-CDI is designed to work with other metadata schema and with various semantic artefacts (vocabularies and ontologies).  Further information about the specification is linked below.

DDI-CDI Documentation

 

CODATA Collaboration on DDI-CDI

The draft specification for DDI-CDI released in early 2020. The original vision and further development was greatly assisted by the series of workshops at Schloss Dagstuhl on the interoperability of metadata standards in cross-domain science, held in collaboration between the DDI Alliance and CODATA, as well as the case studies and development of CDIF in the WorldFAIR project.

DDI-CDI 2020 Webinar Series

In 2020, CODATA collaborated with the DDI Alliance on a series of webinars, workshops and conference sessions about DDI-CDI to encourage feedback and explore applications.  This work contributed substantively to the further development of DDI-CDI and to the identification of case studies, a process which was then reinforced by the report on DDI-CDI and EOSC.

The Role of DDI-CDI in EOSC: Possible Uses and Applications

CODATA, in partnership with the DDI Alliance, successfully completed a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) co-creation project in April 2021 which explored the potential uses and applications of the draft Data Documentation Initiative Cross-Domain Integration (DDI-CDI) specification for EOSC.

Report: The Role of DDI-CDI in EOSC – Possible Uses and Applications: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4707263

A launch workshop was held on 11 June 2021 with the objective of discussing this report and further identifying cross-domain use cases for inclusion in future work.  The presentation and recording, and further information about the report, may be viewed at this page: DDI-CDI and EOSC.

This page last updated: 2025-06-26.