Since the initial launch of the ODISSEI Portal prototype in September 2022, it has been continuously improved. With this launch, important steps have been made in the area of metadata. For instance, the Portal automatically refreshes the metadata of the connected data providers, making it always up-to-date. The metadata of the Individual Development Data Catalogue has also been added and the metadata in the Portal is enriched. As a result, the Portal is now no longer a prototype and officially a product that continues to be maintained and improved.
Individual Development Data Catalogue
Users can find metadata from more than 9.000 datasets that are available at CBS, Centerdata, DANS, IISG, and the institutes affiliated with DataverseNL. The Portal now also includes metadata from the Individual Development Data Catalogue which is a centralized metadata repository for six Dutch developmental cohort studies that were involved in the Consortium on Individual Development (CID, an NWO funded Gravitation project). The metadata were created in the PDI-SSH funded project: Connecting Data on Child Development (CD2).
Automatic updates
The earlier versions of the Portal displayed fixed copies of the metadata at a certain period of time. In the new version, the metadata catalogue will be updated automatically, ensuring it is always up to date with the latest information from the metadata providers. Each night the Portal checks for new records from the providers so that the information in the Portal remains up-to-date. One exception is the CBS metadata as these records are delivered to the Portal by means of a periodic export from the internal registry of CBS microdata.
Metadata enrichments
All metadata in the Portal is organized by common international standards, in particular the CESSDA Metadata Model (CMM). Moreover, we include a provider-specific metadata block where any information that is not covered elsewhere can be included.
A key feature of the ODISSEI Portal is our enrichment pipeline. We enrich the harvested metadata by adding standardised keywords from the European Social Sciences Language Thesaurus (ELSST). The ELSST is a popular vocabulary that is used by many archives in the social sciences and endorsed and managed by CESSDA. The Portal enrichment allows users to find datasets across all data providers based on the standardised ELSST terms. Another enrichment is the CBS Variable Thesaurus.
Future of the ODISSEI Portal
The ODISSEI team, of which DANS is also a part, aims to expand our coverage by including more data providers and enhancing the user experience to help researchers access the data they need. Additionally, we will improve the discoverability of the Portal metadata through further enrichments and integrations with European discovery platforms, such as the CESSDA Data Catalogue.
The ODISSEI Portal is freely available at https://portal.odissei.nl/.
For more information about the Portal or to provide feedback, please contact: info@odissei-data.n
