We analyzed our current data structures and working habits of, and with the DDI-FlatDB with respect to efficiency of data access and the effectiveness of the developer, adopting new DDI versions. For data structures within DDI we found internal links, directing forward and backward within a study as well as links to external sources, like institutions or controlled vocabulary. Instantiating these links lead currently to slow access times and to load large portions of XML snippets. In order to overcome this drawbacks the idea is to extend the DDI-FlatDB to instantiate all links within a link database based on Linked Open Data principles. This will lead to an efficient access within and across surveys. We will describe how we plan to store the links as triplets and what the advantages will be.
Along adapting DDI and XML for the CESSDA CV Manager, we found, that the description of the mapping of DDI elements via XPaths to our entities is still a complex tasks and involves XPath creation and verification of results, which lead to inefficient turnaround times. We plan to create a specific editor for capturing the structure when editing XPaths, so the developing time will be more efficient and less error-prone
