Citation and Coverage

Citation in DDI is used by all publication structures, Phyiscal Instance, Other Material, and Collection or Item descriptions. A citation in DDI reflects the content of a basic bibliographic citation. All citations support the use of full Dublin Core Terms. The fields in the DDI citation support linking to Organizations and Individuals described in an Organization Scheme where appropriate. Note that the citation in Physical Instance is the citation for the related data file.

Coverage is represented in a separate section available in all maintainable modules. Coverage is separated into Temporal, Topical, and Spatial coverage. It is assumed that coverage expressed in a Study Unit or Group represents the extent of coverage of their contained modules. A module such as DataCollection may be expressed as a restriction of the parent Study Unit. For example, a Data Collection for a specific time period within the full temporal coverage of the Study Unit, or a Physical Instance for a data set that covers only a single country within a multi-country study.

Citation and Coverage are intended to contain information that is readily mapped to external search systems that support standard Dublin Core-like discovery metadata and should reflect the needs of these external systems. The use of shared or common subject headings or thesauri facilitate discovery in these systems.