CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) hosts a couple of controlled vocabularies (CVs) from CESSDA and DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) which can be used to annotate social science datasets. One of these CVs is the CESSDA topic classification, which contains a list of terms that can be used to describe the main themes or subjects of the data that has been collected for a particular study. This topic classification will for instance be used in the CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC), a European catalogue that indexes datasets available across European Social Science data archives, including DANS.
CESSDA Vocabulary Service
The CESSDA topic classification and other CESSDA and DDI vocabularies are available through the CESSDA Vocabulary Service. The CVs are originally published in English but translations are available in several other languages that have been provided by the CESSDA community.
Dutch translation by DANS
Within ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Economic Innovations) and CESSDA, DANS is involved in improving the FAIRness of Dutch social science datasets. Using existing CVs to describe and index datasets is an important aspect in improving the findability of available data. Using vocabularies that are available across multiple languages also simplifies the search across languages.
To allow datasets to be annotated with Dutch terms, DANS has translated the terms of the CESSDA topic classification, as well as eight other commonly used vocabularies available in the CVS. The newly translated terms can be used in DANS’ Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, as well as in the ODISSEI portal, a metadata portal developed within the ODISSEI roadmap project to annotate datasets and metadata.
More information
The translations are available in skos format and can be downloaded freely under a CC-BY license. The CESSDA Vocabulary Service is currently in its beta stage and accessible online.
