Best Practices Documents: Are They Really Necessary?

In Ontario, there is a movement afoot to mark up surveys in DDI and put them in an interface that allows them to be shared with other universities. A noble exercise, indeed! Our project, (Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure Initiative) provides university researchers with unprecedented access to a significant number of datasets in a web-based data extraction system. Access to the data with its accompanying standardized metadata is key to our project. However, the staff marking up these surveys do not necessarily think alike, so the formats used in marking up the surveys can and do vary across institutions. And this is taking place in only one province so this begs the question of what the formatting looks like when the marking up is done nationally. In this presentation, we will discuss the five Ws of a Best Practices Document: why we need one; when it happened; where it was put together; what the process was; and who will benefit from it.在安大略省，目前正在推进一项举措：为采用数据文档倡议（Data Documentation Initiative，DDI）标准的调查问卷进行结构化标注，并搭建可用于与其他高校共享这些问卷的交互界面。此实为一项颇具价值的工作！我们的项目——安大略省数据文档、提取服务与基础设施倡议（Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure Initiative），旨在为高校科研人员提供前所未有的便捷访问途径，使其可通过基于网页的数据提取系统获取海量数据集。获取附带标准化元数据的数据集，正是本项目的核心目标。然而，各参与机构的调查问卷标注人员未必遵循统一的处理逻辑，因此不同机构在标注调查问卷时所采用的格式存在差异，且这种差异确实存在。而这一切仅发生在单个省份，这便引出了一个关键问题：若在全国范围内开展问卷标注工作，格式标准将呈现何种样貌？在本次汇报中，我们将围绕最佳实践文档的五大核心要素展开讨论：为何需要制定该文档、其制定的时间节点、编制的开展地点、具体的编制流程，以及哪些主体将从中获益。