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IPS155 Emily W. et al.
Besides these activities and the contribution of INEXDA to the 9th biennial IFC
Conference, INEXDA will also make contributions to the 2018 Conference of
European Statistics Stakeholders (CESS) in Bamberg, and the 62nd ISI World
Statistical Congress in Kuala Lumpur in 2019.

4.1 Comprehensive inventory of data in member institutions
From the start, the INEXDA network has collaborated to harmonise
metadata structures by conducting extensive stock-taking of available data
sets in member institutions. The goals are:
1. to provide an overview of available and potentially comparable
granular data sets from participating institutions;
2. to enable data users to discover and use appropriate data sets for
their own research and analyses, which the participating
institutions agree to share;
3. and to prepare a framework to facilitate a possible harmonisation
of data sets in the (near) future.
Because the descriptions of the data should be comparable, an agreement
on a metadata schema for the granular data was established between all
members. To this end, the INEXDA metadata schema closely follows the da|ra
metadata schema (version 4.0), which was jointly developed by the GESIS –
Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the ZBW – Leibniz Information
Centre for Economics. The INEXDA metadata schema is designed to provide
metadata for microdata at the data set level.
Adapting an existing metadata schema to fit the purpose of INEXDA
provides a level of standardisation for microdata produced in different
countries, institutions, and with different aims. Furthermore, the
interoperability of the INEXDA metadata schema with the da|ra metadata
schema allows for seamless transition between the INEXDA and da|ra
databases, which makes it easier to obtain digital object identifier (DOI) for
datasets in the future.
All INEXDA members agreed on a metadata schema, which, first, describes
the data sets in a comprehensive way for the purposes mentioned above.
Second, the schema is easy to use for potential users and data producers. It
should be noted, that the metadata schema revolves around a “standardised
data set”, which is a snapshot of data produced in an institution (eg credit
register) taken at a certain point in time (e. g. 1999-2017). To this end, INEXDA
devised 21 items for its metadata schema (see table 1).
Furthermore, INEXDA has created a platform (see figure 2) for collecting
and exchanging the metadata information produced during the inventory.
This platform is available to all INEXDA member institutions. The platform is
being developed jointly with GESIS.

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