In addition to social sciences metadata from CBS, LISS, DataverseNL and DANS the metadata from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) is now included. The Portal also harvests the newly released DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities which has replaced the DANS archive EASY.
Improved search for CBS metadata
In this updated version of the ODISSEI Portal prototype, improvements are made to better find metadata related to CBS microdata sets. There is much more information included on the variables which are now visible in the metadata block “Variable information”. It is now also possible to search for metadata records based on the short names used in the CBS Remote Access environment (e.g. KINDOUDERTAB).
Multilingual search for CBS keywords
A great improvement is that the Portal now supports multilingual search for CBS keywords. The CBS metadata is enriched by mapping the available Dutch keywords to keywords in the European Social Sciences Language Thesaurus (ELSST). In ELSST translations are available into other languages and this allows you to find Dutch metadata records when searching with English terms. For example, when you are in the CBS part of the ODISSEI Portal, you can search for “employment” and find datasets related to this, even though the metadata is only available in Dutch. This feature will be extended and improved in the next few months.
Further developments
Until the end of 2024, the Portal will be further developed and improved by ODISSEI, DANS, VU and SURF as part of the ODISSEI Roadmap project. The collected metadata will be enriched with existing controlled vocabularies to increase the findability of the information. More metadata providers will be added to the Portal with the ultimate goal of giving researchers access to information about all relevant social science datasets in the Netherlands. Data providers from the ODISSEI community are encouraged to get in touch with the Portal team to make their metadata available in the Portal. Last but not least, the functionalities around the data access broker will be developed, which should enable users to request data directly from the various data providers.
The ODISSEI Portal is freely available here.
For more information about the Portal or to provide feedback, please send an e-mail to ODISSEI.
With a first prototype launched in September 2022, the Portal combines metadata from a wide variety of research data repositories into a single interface, allowing for advanced queries to support findability, and facilitate data access to social science datasets in the Netherlands.
