During the Dutch national Open Science Festival on September 1st, ODISSEI launched the first version of the ODISSEI Portal. The ODISSEI Portal combines metadata from a wide variety of research data repositories into a single interface, which is already searchable and which in future will allow for advanced semantic queries to support further findability and will facilitate data access to social science datasets in the Netherlands.
The Portal is developed by ODISSEI, DANS, SURF and VU as part of the ODISSEI roadmap project to improve the existing infrastructure for the social sciences in the Netherlands.
The ODISSEI Portal was officially launched during a session at the Netherlands National Open Science Festival. After a short introduction to ODISSEI and why a new data portal is needed, a live demo of the Portal was given. The audience was then invited to try out the Portal on their own and discuss their findings and remarks. Interesting points were raised, including for instance the opportunity to include metadata from datasets stored at University repositories and a discussion on interoperability at the level of measurements and variables. Going forward, users’ feedback is key to make sure the ODISSEI Portal is tailored to the research community.
Metadata from CBS, LISS and DANS
The first version of the Portal contains more than 4,000 metadata records from three metadata providers: CBS, Centerdata and DANS. Users can find information about the microdata available in the remote access environment of CBS, the LISS panel study data run by Centerdata, and the social science datasets archived at DANS.
The Portal builds on Dataverse which is an open source repository software used by many data archives worldwide. Through the Dataverse instance users can search across the different collections to find information about relevant datasets for their studies. The metadata stored in the Portal is connected through the ODISSEI Knowledge Graph which allows enrichments of the available information through linked open data.
Further developments
Over the next two years, the Portal will be further developed: We will enrich the collected metadata with existing controlled vocabularies which will further improve the discoverability and the information available to the user.
More data providers will be added to the Portal with the ultimate goal to allow social science researchers in the Netherlands to find all the relevant data for their work in one online environment. We actively encourage data providers in the ODISSEI community to contact us about making their metadata available in the Portal.
Last but not least, we are working on the functionality of our data access broker allowing users of the Portal to request access to the datasets hosted by different providers directly from the ODISSEI Portal environment.
The first version of the ODISSEI Portal is freely available at https://portal.odissei.nl/.
If you would like to know more about the Portal or if you want to provide us with feedback, you can get in touch with us via: info@odissei-data.nl