Creating a Custom Concept System to Document Longitudinal Studies

The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) began working with DDI-Lifecycle in 2018. Since then, NACDA has made efforts to document in DDI-Lifecycle some of our most established and frequently-used longitudinal data collections and display them on a Colectica Portal. In this presentation, I will describe NACDA’s efforts to develop a system of standardized taxonomy of topics by which to organize conceptual variables in the cross-wave, cross-series, and multi-series comparisons available on the NACDA-Colectica portal. The discussion will include how organizing conceptual variables in these data collections into topical groups improves the interoperability and findability of the metadata on our portal, how the system has evolved over time, and our plans for its improvement and use in the future.