New version ODISSEI Portal offers metadata in Croissant-format

The Portal is built on Dataverse software which has been upgraded to version 6.2. This version includes exciting new features to make it easier to find the right datasets and improve the reusability of the (meta)data. 

Quickly find open datasets 

Next to filtering on publication year or topic, the Portal now allows users to select only openly available datasets licensed under creative commons. For datasets that are available with restrictions, the Terms metadata includes a connection with the Data Access Broker (DAB) prototype that redirects the user to the access information available at a given data provider. In further releases, the DAB will be extended to automatically parse the licensing conditions.  

Export metadata in Croissant format

The Portal now also allows downloading metadata in the new Croissant format, which makes metadata better suitable for machine learning. Croissant was developed by a community from academia and industry with active participation of DANS and Harvard, building upon schema.org,. Since its release Croissant has been supported by various tools and repositories and since version 6.2 it is included in the main code of the Dataverse software. This further improves the FAIRness of the metadata available in the Portal with other repositories and tools, including commercial platforms like Kaggle and HuggingFace. 

Metadata enrichments

A key feature of the ODISSEI Portal is our enrichment pipeline. Metadata that is collected from the data providers is harmonised and we enrich the metadata by adding standardised keywords. In particular, we map to the European Social Sciences Language Thesaurus (ELSST), 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. 

Portal presentations

A webinar is planned to guide researchers how to use the Portal. The Portal team will also present the Portal at the ODISSEI Conference. The Portal will be further developed and improved until the end of 2024 as part of the ODISSEI Roadmap project. From 2025 onwards the Portal will be integrated into the work on search and data discovery within the FAIR workstream of SSHOC-NL – a collaboration between ODISSEI and CLARIAH. 

The ODISSEI Portal is freely available. For more information about the Portal or to provide feedback, please contact: