Research & Development
Current Projects
CESSDA-ERIC
Archiving social science data optimally and ensuring access for researchers across national borders is a major challenge. To meet this challenge, CESSDA is shifting into a new organisation, ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). CESSDA Research Infrastructure is one of the 35 projects that were listed on the ESFRI Roadmap in 2006.
Several European countries have signed the Memorandum of Understanding to commit their financial and political support for the setting up of CESSDA-RI. The infrastructure will be hosted by Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). The Research Council of Norway granted funding for CESSDA-ERIC Preparation for the period 10.10.2011 - 31.12.2012. The funding enables the consortium to prepare the actual establishment of CESSDA-ERIC. During 2013, CESSDA will carry out a self-evaluation project of the member archives to provide information on how the CESSDA members meet the requirements of the CESSDA-ERIC Statutes.
For further information, please contact Director Bjørn Henrichsen (NSD).
Data without Boundaries (DWB)
Access across borders to highly detailed official microdata is a crucial issue for researchers. Data without Boundaries (DWB) is a FP7-funded project designed to improve access to official statistics across Europe. Among the 20+ project partners are CESSDA Archives, National Statistical Institutes and Universities. The project started in May 2011. For further information, please see www.dwbproject.org or contact Project Coordinator Roxane Silberman (Réseau Quetelet).
Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities (DASISH)
CESSDA has partnered on an FP7 project for the Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities (DASISH). The three-year project (2012-2014) will address issues that are faced by all five social science and humanities infrastructures: CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS and SHARE. For further information, please see http://dasish.eu or contact Project Coordinator Hans Jørgen Marker (Swedish National Data Service).
Support for Establishment of National/Regional Social Sciences Data Archives (SERSCIDA)
The SERSCIDA project is designed as a strategic project for supporting the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between the EU countries associated within CESSDA and the Western Balkan Countries (WBC) in the field of social science data archiving. CESSDA is not directly involved, but the project will build on some elements of work on widening CESSDA, carried out during the CESSDA PPP. Further information is available at the SERSCIDA project website.
Completed Projects
CESSDA PPP
The two-year (2008-2009) project planned the future development of the CESSDA RI and focused on tackling and resolving a number of strategic, financial and legal issues in order to ensure that European social science and humanities (SSH) researchers have access to, and gain support for, the data resources they require to conduct research of the highest quality, irrespective of the location of either researcher or data within the European Research Area (ERA). The project was a direct result of the CESSDA RI being identified by the ESFRI Roadmap exercise as a research network of excellence. [more...]
Madiera
The Madiera project (Multilingual Access to Data Infrastructures of the European Research Area), completed in 2006, provided a common integrated interface to the resources of the majority of the social science data archives in Europe. The project was funded by the European Commission under the 5th Framework Programme.
Metadater
The objective of Metadater (Metadata Management and Production System for Surveys in Empirical Socio-Economic Research, 2003-2006) was to develop a comprehensive data model for comparative surveys and tools for metadata management in survey research. Metadater was funded by the European Commission under the 5th Framework Programme.
FASTER
This two year project (2000-2001) builded on Nesstar technology and aimed at providing flexible access to statistics, tables and electronic resources held at social science data archives and other data publishers.
NESSTAR
NESSTAR, Networked Social Science Tools and Resources, was funded during 1998-2000 by DGXIII of the European Commission under the 4th Framework Telematics Applications Program. The aim of the project was to bring the advantages of the Web to the world of statistical data dissemination. Today, Nesstar is a software system for data publishing and online analysis.
LIMBER
The goal of the LIMBER project (Language Independent Metadata Browsing of European Resources, 2000-2001) was to facilitate cross-European data analysis independent of domain, resource, language and vocabulary. The main output of this EU (European Union) IST (Information Societies Technology) funded project was the multi-lingual ELSST thesaurus.