Proposal for the creation of a Web-based heterogeneous distributed archive for psychological data

This report presents a proposal to create archives of data from psychological research and associated metadata Web pages and link them into a heterogeneous distributed archive on the World-Wide Web. Several specific recommendations are made concerning some of the issues faced by the data archivist and data archive user hoping to use the Web. In particular, a recommendation is made to create a publicly accessible Web page for each data set and place keywords, experimental methods, data descriptions, pointers to journal articles, and pointers to other archive Web pages pertinent to this data set on this metadata Web page. If the archivist includes a special keyword (PsychologyDataArchive) on the metadata Web page, Web-based search engines will automatically be able to subset all participating data archives for indexing and semantic analysis. The secondary data analyst can then include the word PsychologyDataArchive in his Web search and will be able to effectively find relevant participating Web data archives.