DDI4 in R – New Possibilities Operations on Metadata

Abstract

We have been working on a representation of the DDI4 model in R, realized as a package. We now have an R object oriented class for each DDI4 class with associated functions to validate and print objects, manage a registry of DDI4 objects, manage DDI4 URNs, and import & export DDI4 XML. Our original goal was to enhance the ability of researchers to capture and report on metadata at the source, with the ability to embed references to metadata. In this presentation we’ll discuss the intriguing prospect of computing directly on the metadata. What could be done with these metadata objects to facilitate comparison and harmonization? In what ways could the metadata be visualized? DDI4 has powerful new capabilities in the Collections pattern. For classes realizing a collection, operators could be defined to return their intersection, union, and difference. Inner and outer joins could also be defined. Relationships within the collection could be visualized via network diagrams. These operators might provide efficient tools for harmonization. Operators could also be defined on pairs of objects of the same class. Similarity measures could be computed via corresponding attributes. These could be used to create visualizations of, say, similarities among variables.