Towards a Global Infrastructure for Data and Metadata: The Open Data Foundation

The Open Data Foundation (ODaF) was created in 2007 to promote the use of open standards for exchanging data and metadata in the fields of statistics, scientific research, and social sciences research. The organization represents international experts from fields as diverse as central banks, national statistical agencies, data archives, public opinion polling organizations, technology standards experts, and the research community.

Many useful standards exist and are now emerging for the exchange and use of data and metadata between organizations. If the Web 2.0 vision of the Internet as a platform for distributed computing is to be realized, there needs to be a solid technical underpinning for the models and formats used to exchange needed data and metadata. At the same time, there are many complex problems, relating not only to discovery, semantics, and exchange protocols, but also to issues such as respondent confidentiality and data ownership.

ODaF was created as a place where experts in the many organizations which produce and consume research data and statistics could meet with experts in the field of technology standards, to discuss how a large-scale infrastructure could be agreed. Standards of interest include everything from the ISO 15000 ebXML and other web-services standards (especially those concerned with registries), ISO 17369 SDMX, the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), ISO 11179 and related standards, and GIS standards such as ISO 19115.

Ongoing work focuses on two areas: the establishment of an understood and coordinated set of standards for exchanging data and metadata between organizations and domain grids, and the development of open-source tools and support for promoting the vision of an organized, registry-oriented framework for handling prolems of large-scale interoperability.

This presentation provides an overview of the problem space, ongoing projects, related standards, and the overall vision of the organization. Without a well-coordinated approach to the use of standards, a global infrastructure for the data and metadata needed by distributed applications cannot be successfully built – it is the goal of ODaF to help meet this challenge.