The Swiss Virtual Educational Observatory and DDI

The Swiss Virtual Educational Observatory (VEO) project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It has the goal to link and to visual sources of research data about education and learning. While concentrating on research data itself data documentation and sources of open research data are relevant as well.
The first step to find research data is looking for open data and data documentations. This is where DDI can play is crucial role. But sadly, it does not.
Still there are sources not documented at all or documented in Excel or Word. Institutions using a machine-readable documentation have developed solutions individual to their institution. Provider of smaller data sources struggle with having enough resources for a good data documentation. All this is making data discovery a hard job. Accordingly, hindering research.
Why is this still the case and how can it be overcome?
Switch, a Swiss service provider for infrastructures, has developed a tool for open data sources that collected data form different standards and variations of those standards. Is this the way to go? Or need data providers to be forced to use a standardized standard?
The talk will give examples and provide thesis about how to go ahead in Switzerland.