The newly updated version of the ODISSEI Portal improves discovery of more than 9,500 social science datasets from Dutch data providers. The update includes an improved display of the controlled vocabularies as well as software and documentation updates, making the Portal more stable and easier to use.
The ODISSEI Portal is the place to find social science datasets available in the Netherlands and thereby has an important part within the social science research infrastructure. Instead of searching separately at each data provider, social science datasets from a range of data providers in the Netherlands can be found in one place. As part of the SSHOC-NL FAIR workstream, the ODISSEI Portal team presents an improved user experience in a newly released update.
Software update
The Portal runs on Dataverse software and has now been upgraded to version 6.6 ensuring we keep the software up to date. DANS, who maintains the Portal for ODISSEI and also uses Dataverse software for its repositories, is an active member of the Dataverse community. Contributions made by DANS, which are also featured in the ODISSEI Portal, include support for controlled vocabularies and metadata export in Croissant, a metadata format which facilitates machine learning applications.
Rich metadata with controlled vocabularies
A unique feature of the ODISSEI Portal that has been optimized in this update is that the metadata we receive from data providers is enriched with information from controlled vocabularies, using Dataverse’s built-in controlled vocabulary support feature.
Datasets described in Dutch can be found with English search terms, as datasets get enriched with keywords from the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) controlled vocabulary. The ELSST contains over 3,400 concepts in English, Dutch and other European languages, and their translations. A URI in the Portal allows users to navigate to the connected vocabulary of every linked term in the metadata.
Extended documentation
In the SSHOC-NL community, transparency and reusability of the work is crucial and that is why the code used for the ODISSEI Portal is openly available on Github. The available documentation has been extended to offer clearer insight into the Portal’s infrastructure. The ODISSEI GitHub page provides more elaborate information about the different components of the Portal, the environments and servers, as well as the services that are used for the different workflows in the Portal. Based on user feedback, the Portal User Guide was also updated earlier this year. The Guide now contains more information about the possibility to harvest metadata from the Portal.
Outlook
The Portal team led by DANS aims to expand the coverage by including more data providers and enhancing the user experience of researchers in finding the data they need. Feedback from users is always welcome to guide future developments.
An exciting development is that conversations with CESSDA – the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives – have started, about including metadata from the ODISSEI Portal in the CESSDA Data Catalogue. This will make the metadata from the ODISSEI Portal findable alongside European datasets available at CESSDA archives.
The ODISSEI Portal is freely available at portal.odissei.nl. For more information about the Portal or to provide feedback, please contact .
