A controlled vocabulary is an organized set of terms. Controlled vocabularies make it easier to make information consistent. They also improve indexing and searching for information. DDI Lifecycle supports using controlled vocabularies for many of its metadata fields.

Colectica 6.2 adds support for controlled vocabularies in its desktop and Web tools. Administrators can configure which vocabulary to use for specific content fields. Users can choose terms from the appropriate vocabulary when editing content.

Vocabularies are specified as DDI Lifecycle code lists. DDI code lists allow specifying the values and terms of a vocabulary in one or more languages. Organizations can register these code lists in a metadata repository for persistence and revision tracking.

Colectica can import vocabularies from the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) runs a vocabulary service, providing 28 vocabularies in more than 10 languages. These vocabularies are downloadable in SKOS format. This presentation will show how all these vocabularies can integrate with DDI Lifecycle and the Colectica software.