Creating an ISO Standard for the DDI Suite

Since DDI is a suite of standards and other semantic products, the idea of creating an ISO standard for them is a challenge. Do we pick one of the DDI products and create a standard for that? Which one? Why? Will the revision schedule for the product selected interfere with the creation and maintenance for the standard? Will the Alliance be able to provide the resources for an ambitious standardization process? And can we produce a standard that represents the work under DDI yet stands on its own and is not subject to the revision schedule for DDI products? Rather than try to address these questions directly, the Scientific Board established a temporary working group (tWG) to look into the question. The tWG elected to copy the approach SDMX took for a similar project 20 years ago. The SDMX standard focused on the core strength of SDMX - exchange. So, the tWG endeavored to find similar strengths of DDI. What are the core strengths of the products in the DDI suite? The tWG decided to focus on variables (the variable cascade in particular) and the data lifecycle. Each DDI standard addresses variables and can be situated in the data lifecycle. These are the core strengths. Creating a standard around these will satisfy all the conditions laid out above. This paper considers the questions posed above and addresses the answers outlined. Finally, the path forward in the ISO community will be described.