munging metadata

During May and June the SHARE team has been busy on a number of fronts. In June we plan to begin beta testing the eSHARE site for machine-readable downloads of the CDISC standards.  The eSHARE site will be part of the new CDISC web site that will be launched in June. The SHARE team has also been actively designing new forms of standards content for SHARE, including Research Concepts and explicit Value Level Metadata representations. A white paper describing our initial solution for Research Concepts will be distributed for review in June. Also during June we plan to complete an initial proof-of-concept project towards a long-term Research Concept solution. Value Level Metadata (VLM) blog postings started in May and will continue through June. We plan to publish a white paper describing how VLM content will be represented in SHARE, and exported in Define-XML format, later in the summer. The SHARE Metadata Curators continue their work with the foundational standards teams to lo...

As part of the work to implement Value Level Metadata in SHARE, as well as to author a Define-XML Implementation Guide article, this will be the first of a series of posts on the topic of Value Level Metadata. These posts target a more technical audience, however the Define-XML IG article will include less technical jargon. Future posts will cover additional Value Level Metadata topics and examples. Value Level Metadata (VLM) is metadata that constrains a variable definition based on the value of another variable(s). VLM was originally specified in Define-XML v1.0 as a mechanism for providing the additional metadata needed for software to more accurately interpret these constrained variables.  For example, VSORRES is a variable with structural metadata of  DataType=”Text” and Length=”200”. However, when VSTESTCD=”DIABP” that definition is constrained by VLM to use DataType=”integer” and Length="3". In this case, the value of DIABP in VSTESTCD has triggered the application o...