NCRN Meeting Spring 2016: Crowdsourcing Metadata – Challenges and Outlook

Abstract

Recent years have shown the power of user-sourced information evidenced by the success of Wikipedia and its many emulators. This sort of unstructured discussion is currently not feasible as a part of the otherwise successful metadata repositories. Creating and augmenting metadata is a labor-intensive endeavor. Harnessing collective knowledge from actual data users can supplement officially generated metadata. As part of our Comprehensive Extensible Data Documentation and Access Repository (CED²AR) infrastructure, we demonstrate a prototype of crowdsourced DDI on actual codebooks. While the system itself is more general, the demonstrated implementation relies on a set of linked deployments of the basic software on web servers. The backend transparently handles changes, and frontend has the ability to separate official edits (by designated curators of the data and the metadata) from crowd-sourced content. The implementation allows a data curator, such as a statistical agency, to collect and incorporate improvements suggested by knowledgeable users in a structured way.