R&D work in developing, refining and testing models for data exchange for qualitative research data has led to the publication of the QuDEx schema, recommended for rich description of archival qualitive data.

The development of a model for describing qualitative data collections took as its starting point earlier work indertaken by the UK Data Archive in the early 2000s on descriptive metadata for its non-numeric data collections.

In 2003 the Archive's qualitative team developed a draft but limited formal definition of a common XML vocabulary and Document Type Definition (DTD) based on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for describing complex data structures.

Follwing a JISC grant in 2005-2006, a draft XML metadata schema, known as QuDEx (Qualitative Data Exchange) was designed and published.

QuDEx arose from a comparison of the key functionalities for the market-leading qualitative software packages in the hope of stimulating data exchange and import and export facilities in these softwares. It defined common denominator functions for documenting,organising and analysing qualitative data: coding, classifying, memoing, and relating. These core concepts helped defined the QuDEx schema.

The QuDEx standard/schema is a software-neutral format for qualitative data that preserves annotations of, and relationships between, data and other related objects. It can be viwed as the optimal baseline data exchange model for the archiving and interchange of data and metadata.

A lay introduction can be found in the 2011 article by Corti and Gregory.

The schema,documentation and outputs from the project can be accessed on:

Schema and documentation

Project reports and presentations are available from:

PROJECT Outputs