Welcome to the Data Documentation Initiative | Data Documentation Initiative

Document, Discover and Interoperate

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. DDI is a free standard that can document and manage different stages in the research data lifecycle, such as conceptualization, collection, processing, distribution, discovery, and archiving. Documenting data with DDI facilitates understanding, interpretation, and use -- by people, software systems, and computer networks.

Why Use DDI?

  • Generate interactive codebooks
  • Implement data catalogs
  • Build question banks
  • Create concordance mappings
  • Harmonize and compare data
  • Manage longitudinal data sets

Featured DDI Adopters