Open AccessThe Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) for Longitudinal Historical Microdata, version 4
Author(s) -
George Alter,
Kees Mandemakers
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
historical life course studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2352-6343
DOI - 10.51964/hlcs9290
Subject(s) - microdata (statistics) , computer science , metadata , collaboratory , table (database) , geospatial analysis , information retrieval , reciprocal , data science , world wide web , data mining , census , geography , cartography , population , linguistics , philosophy , demography , sociology
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) is a standard data format that has been adopted by several large longitudinal databases on historical populations. Since the publication of the first version in Historical Social Research in 2009, two improved and extended versions have been published in the Collaboratory Historical Life Courses. In this publication we present version 4 which is the latest ‘official’ standard of the IDS. Discussions with users over the last four years resulted in important changes, like the inclusion of a new table defining the hierarchical relationships among ‘contexts’, decision schemes for recording relationships, additional fields in the metadata table, rules for handling stillbirths, a reciprocal model for relationships, guidance for linking IDS data with geospatial information, and the introduction of an extended IDS for computed variables.