Written by the ODISSEI Portal Team

We are happy to present a new version of the ODISSEI Portal. With a first prototype launched in September 2022, the 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.

In our new version of the prototype, we include metadata from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) in addition to metadata from CBS, DANS, LISS and DataverseNL. We also now harvest the newly released DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities which has replaced the DANS archive EASY. In the ODISSEI Portal, users can now find almost 7,500 datasets available throughout the different Dutch institutes.

Improved search for CBS metadata 

In this third version of the ODISSEI Portal prototype, we made improvements to better find metadata related to CBS microdata sets. We include much more information on the variables which are now visible in the metadata block “Variable information”. It is now also possible to search for metadata records based on the short names used in the CBS Remote Access environment (e.g. KINDOUDERTAB).

Multilingual search for CBS keywords

A great improvement is that the Portal now supports multilingual search for CBS keywords. We enriched the CBS metadata by mapping the available Dutch keywords to keywords in the European Social Sciences Language Thesaurus (ELSST). In ELSST translations are available into other languages and this allows us to find the Dutch metadata records when searching with English terms. For example, when you are in the CBS part of the ODISSEI Portal, you can search for “employment” and find datasets related to this, even though the metadata is only available in Dutch. This feature will be further improved and extended in the next months.

Further developments

The Portal will be further developed and improved until the end of 2024 by ODISSEI, DANS, VU and SURF as part of the ODISSEI Roadmap project.

The collected metadata will be further enriched with existing controlled vocabularies to increase the findability of the information. More metadata providers will be added to the Portal with the ultimate goal of giving researchers access to information about all relevant social science datasets in the Netherlands. Data providers from the ODISSEI community are encouraged to get in touch with the Portal team to make their metadata available in the Portal.

Last but not least, we are working on functionalities around the data access broker, which should enable users to request data directly from the various data providers.

The ODISSEI Portal is freely available at https://portal.odissei.nl/.

For more information about the Portal or to provide feedback, please contact: info@odissei-data.nl