More Updates for Dataverse 4.0 Beta: More Metadata + SPSS File Handling
Eleni Castro
Metadata Updates
Highly requested from our international users, we now support being able to add the language of your dataset, which will help when searching or browsing through multilingual datasets. This extensive list is based on the ISO 639-1 languages list. On a related note, we are also looking into supporting a multilingual Dataverse user interface; see our Dataverse Internationalization feature support ticket for more information.
To allow for easier browsing and searching of geographic information we have created the Geospatial Metadata Block, with an extensive list of countries based on on ISO 3166-1. There are also free-text options for other geographic information (see screenshot below).
Coming soon: More Biomedical Metadata
We’ve been working closely with several incredibly helpful biomedical metadata experts at:
- Harvard-based eagle-i Network (Cell-line ontology),
- the Oxford University-based ISATools team, and
the Stem Cell Commons group (Harvard Stem Cell Institute)
to help Dataverse allow researchers to easily describe and discover biomedical datasets derived from experiments. Stay tuned for more choices of terms from standards based biomedical ontologies. We are also looking for more biomedical data sets to test uploading into Dataverse 4.0 so please get in touch if you can help us with this.
Special handling for SPSS Files
This is a feature we support in our current production version of Dataverse (3.x) but has only just now been implemented in 4.0 Beta. Try uploading SPSS files in either .por or .sav formats and then click on the Explore button to subset, analyze and visualize the data with TwoRavens. (Note: To ensure long term preservation and make reuse easier, the SPSS file will be also saved and made available as an open format tab-delimited text file.)
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Eleni Castro
Research Coordinator, Data Acquisition and Archiving, Data Science
IQSS, Harvard University