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DataverseEU: reducing language barriers

26.01.2018

This week the “CESSDA DataverseEU” project kickoff took place in Vienna. What will we do in this project? Together with our European partners we will improve our archive solution. The DataverseEU project refines and develops functionalities, like a multilingual user interface.

AUSSDA is proud to be a partner in the DataverseEU project, which will make our archive more user friendly. Dataverse installations can be found worldwide and programmers from all over the world are constantly further developing the open source software under American supervision. CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) will host a Dataverse Installation on its cloud, allowing usage to CESSDA members. It can be used to complement existing archive structures or as initial solution for new or small archives.

Experts from numerous social science data archives, led by Marion Wittenberg of the Dutch data archive DANS, met in Vienna to discuss common requirements for Dataverse. Committed Staff members from Slovenia, Hungary, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands established a work plan to develop certain services, such as a multilingual user interface (at the moment the AUSSDA Dataverse is available exclusively in English).

Not only the users but also the AUSSDA team will benefit from improved functionalities like an API for the CESSDA Topic Classification and the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST). The changes that were mentioned above will be developed and tested throughout the year.

Group photo of the participants of the DataverseEU meeting — The AUSSDA Team, represented by Veronika Heider and Frank Sposito, was excited to host the DataverseEU kickoff meeting in Vienna (photo: AUSSDA/ Martina Frankl)

Presentation being held at the DataverseEU project meeting — Implementing the project requires a lot of technical know-how combined with user-friendly thinking (photo: AUSSDA/ Veronika Heider)