CAQDAS Comparability. What about CAQDAS Data Exchange?

This article seeks to address the theme of the comparability of Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) packages through comparing current software exchangeability and portability. Our perspective is from a data sharing and archiving perspective and the need for open data exchange standards for qualitative data which will enable longer-term sustainability of both data collections and of annotations on these data. Descriptive metadata allow us to describe data robustly and using a common standard enables us to tap the common features of any complex collection. A set of "raw" research outputs (data) have common descriptive elements such as how the research project was funded and how the data were sampled, collected and analysed to form conclusions from that investigation. Data kept for the longer term must ideally be software and platform independent. In this way, we can help future-proof data resources. Most CAQDAS packages use proprietary databases to manage their data and annotations, and very few enable export of annotated data. In this article we argue for an open descriptive standard that will enable description and interpretation of data for the longer term in data archives and to which proprietary software, such as all CAQDAS packages, can import and export. The use of the term "annotation" or "annotating" is taken to mean any action on the text?classifying, coding, memoing or relating. This meaning of the term is commonly used in the linguistic community, but less so by social scientists.