The ODISSEI Portal: building a metadata repository for the social sciences in the Netherlands

Social science research increasingly relies on the use of interlinked data sources, whereby survey data deposited at national or institutional repositories can be linked to data from other sources, e.g. administrative data stored at statistical offices or commercial data made available by private companies. Most of these data sources are highly sensitive and subject to restricted access conditions. Moreover, these diverse data sources are scattered across various repositories, are documented using different standards, and lack standardised access requirements.

The goal of the ODISSEI Portal is to make diverse data sources available through a single search interface by leveraging metadata, therefore leaving data providers in control of the access to their datasets. The ODISSEI Portal consists of three components: first, metadata of studies and variables from different providers is ingested, harmonised, and enriched using semantic artefacts such as multilingual thesauri. Second, the enriched metadata is used to build a knowledge graph that powers an enhanced search functionality. Third, a data access broker enables users to request access to a dataset from the ODISSEI Portal interface, and forwards the request to the data providers for validation. The data access broker relies on a set of machine-readable access conditions and licences designed to specify additional provisions that often apply to sensitive datasets and are not covered by existing solutions.

During the presentation, the development of the three components of the Portal will be illustrated. The lessons learnt can benefit the wider community, especially for what concerns (1) the collaboration with a diverse array of partners (including social scientists, computer scientists, and software developers); (2) the harmonisation of study- and variable-level metadata using DDI; (3) the adaptations implemented in the DataVerse instance the ODISSEI Portal is hosted on. A prototype of the ODISSEI Portal is already publicly available (https://portal.odissei.nl/).