Overarching objectives of the MetaDater project are: to develop standards for the description of large scale comparative surveys over space and time and to provide tools for metadata creation and management for such surveys. In order to achieve these objectives, the MetaDater project has to develop a comprehensive data model for comparative surveys and develop tools for metadata management in survey research. The resulting standards and tools will be applied to test technical harmonization and integration of survey data held by data providers in the participating countries.
By making the standards and tools available to academic and commercial research and through publishing the standards, the MetaDater project will: contribute to best practice in survey data resource sharing and data distribution and facilitate next generation processing and analysis of large amounts of data in order to increase empirical evidence and knowledge about European and global socio-economic developments. The Metadater project is funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework programme. Duration: 2002-2005, Coordinator: Zentralarchiv (ZA) –Germany, partners : seven Archives for Social science data-CESSDA members. Zentralarchiv (ZA) –Germany , Danish Data Archive (DDA) –Denmark, Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) –Finland, GSDB/EKKE -Greece, SIDOS –Switzerland, UK Data Archive (UK_DA) –UK , NIWI-Netherlands.
