DDI-Lifecycle 3.0 in the production of official statistics: views on a preliminary experience

In mid-2022, Statistics Spain (INE) decided to design and set the strategic guidelines for a new technological infrastructure that would provide our statistical office with the necessary hardware and software to automate, standardize, and modernize the entire statistical production process, encompassing improvements in terms of storage, virtualization, ingestion, analysis, processing, and dissemination of information. This ambitious, innovative, and promising project was soon envisioned as a strategic axis of the organization, and one that could not be conceptualized without an exhaustive, necessary, sufficient, and standardized metadata ecosystem. For this reason, a multidisciplinary group of experts from differerent units was tasked with analyzing current metadata international standards, giving special priority and emphasis to the set of structural metadata for microdata, its advantages and disadvantages, as well as the potential a priori materialization of these standards in the institution. This paper summarizes the development of a first proof-of-concept study carried out by Statistics Spain between 2022 and 2024, in which, using the microdata from the Retail Trade Index Survey for January 2021, DDI-L 3.0 has been tested as a potential microdata standard in the production of official statistics. We share our main preliminary findings in this experience to document microdata in a statistical production process.