Many smaller service providers and institutions in the social sciences document survey data only on the level of studies. The reasons are multifold, but one prominent reason is missing software or tool support to document questions and variables. In addition, such tools are usually self-developed and lack functionality and do not provide DDI as metadata standard. Current tools to document studies and questions are DataVerse, NESSTAR and the commercial tool suite Colectica.

In conjunction with the GESIS FlatDB, it is a strong, tested, open-source and DDI compliant technology stack for Social Sciences research institutes to increase findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usability at question and variable level we will provide updates about the GESIS questionnaire editor as open-source service for documentation and translation.

The documented information can directly be published and used for searching e.g., in the GESIS DDI search tool (see presentation: DDI Search: The missing link between researcher and repository).