Project Acronym – Project Plan – Version – Date
JISC Project Plan Template
The Project Management Guidelines have detailed instructions for preparing project plans.
Expand tables as appropriate.
Fill in the information for the header, e.g. project acronym, version, and date.
Prepare a cover sheet using the cover sheet template and attach to the project plan.
Overview of Project
1. Background
Summarise the background to the project (and how it builds on previous work) and the need for it (and
why it’s important).
This project will explore the feasibility of developing data exchange models and data conversion tools
for primary research data collected in the course of empirical research. Data conversion and
proprietary data entry and analysis are particularly important and problematic aspects of data
management and curation. Much important primary research data is created every day in the course
of academic and policy research. While Data Sharing Policies are encouraging sharing and formalised
archiving of data, the ideal life cycle for data creation to re-use remains beset by obstacles. The main
issues involve the buying-in to a dedicated analytic strategy and typically a particular software
package. Over the years the UKDA has seen a number of such softwares quickly become obsolete.
To address the problem of incompatibility between software various data conversion tools have come
of the market. However in the qualitative data analysis software field there are no such inter-software
conversion tools. Open data exchange formats are necessary for maximising the opportunities for
data sharing and long-term archiving.
This project aims to provide researchers and support staff working with primary research data with a
suite of tools that will enable data to be long-term curated and exchangeable. The tools will research
and both develop and test tools for contemporary qualitative data typically used by social researchers.
The data formats to be included are those that are commonly used