CESSDA Data Catalogue and ELSST integration

CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC) contains descriptions of more than 40,000 data collections held by CESSDA’s Service Providers (SP), originating from over 20 European countries. The descriptions follow the DDI metadata standard and are harvested through OAI-PMH from the SPs. A central way of discovering data collections in the CDC is through the use of keywords. Many SPs use CESSDAs own thesaurus for the social sciences, European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST), for keywords. ELSST aims to cover all relevant research subjects within the social science and consists of over 3,300 concepts available in 16 languages through an interactive webservice.

In order to increase data discoverability, and fully utilize the structure of ELSST, we wanted to integrate CDC and ELSST. An important part was to maintain the user friendly UI of CDC, and at the same time support the complexities of ELSST. As a solution for this, the integration between the two services are done using API lookups of relevant metadata elements, presenting themselves as links for the user. Whenever a user discovers a data collection in CDC, there is a check to find out if a given keyword describing the data collection exists as a concept in ELSST. If this is the case, a link to the concept in ELSST is generated. The link will take the user to the concept in ELSST, where the user can read more about the concept and navigate through the thesaurus structure. From ELSST the user can directly search for data collections in the CDC marked with concepts the user discovers.

The integration between the services is both simple and powerful. It enhances the functionality of both with regards to data discovery at the same time avoiding introduction of unnecessary complexities.