The ODISSEI Portal combines metadata from a wide variety of research data repositories into a single interface, allowing for advanced queries to support findability, and facilitate data access to social science datasets in the Netherlands.
We are proud to announce a new prototype version of the Portal which now includes metadata from social science datasets published by Dutch research institutes through DataverseNL. This means that more than 1000 studies from 13 universities and other institutes published in DataverseNL are now also findable through the Portal. Together with metadata from CBS, Centerdata and DANS the Portal makes more than 5000 studies findable.
Improved ingestion pipeline and data citation
Since the first prototype release, at the Open Science Festival in September 2022, we also addressed some small bugs that were discovered by ourselves or the users who tested the Portal. This resulted in a more stable second release of the Portal. We improved the ingestion pipeline and deployment procedures allowing us to more easily integrate new data providers into the Portal in the future. Citing datasets is now easier as well, as the year reported in the recommended citation refers to the distribution date of the dataset.
Transparency and provenance
To allow users to understand the processes that have been used to get the metadata into the Portal, we now include a provenance field. Users can find a list of all the steps that were taken, the scripts that were used and their corresponding Github repositories.
Further developments
The Portal is developed by ODISSEI, DANS, VU and SURF as part of the ODISSEI roadmap project and we will continue to develop the Portal further over the next two years.
We will enrich the collected metadata with existing controlled vocabularies which will further improve the discoverability and the information available to the user.
More metadata 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 prototype 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.