Final Thesis: A Web Service Backend for Archiving and Providing QDA Artifacts

Abstract: Qualitative data analysis tools such as ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and NVivo produce project archives that contain not only primary research material but also coding schemes, annotations, and interpretive structures. These emerge over often extended analytical processes. Existing research repositories largely ignore this internal structure. Instead, uploaded files are typically stored as opaque binary objects, leaving their analytical content invisible to
the archive. Proprietary file formats further increase these limitations. Projects created with one qualitative data analysis tool cannot be reliably transferred to another, and the discontinuation of format support can compromise the long-term accessibility and usability of archived data. To address these limitations, the thesis designs and implements QDArchive, an archival system that manages qualitative research projects as structured,
versioned, and interoperable research objects. Rather than treating them as static files, the architecture models these objects as domain entities with explicit lifecycle states, access semantics, and transformation histories. To support these requirements, QDArchive is implemented as a modular monolith. This architecture was chosen over a microservice architecture because the domain requires strong consistency across lifecycle transitions,
authorization state, and publication visibility. In distributed systems, such guarantees can only be achieved at significant additional operational complexity. The internal structure of the system follows Domain-Driven Design principles and is organized into bounded contexts for archival management, format conversion, and the management of public access and discovery functions. Format conversion and interoperability between different file formats are handled through QDConvert, a dedicated conversion library developed alongside the system. This separation ensures that format-specific differences remain isolated from the system’s archival and access-control mechanisms. The architecture is evaluated against established software quality attributes including maintainability, reliability, and interoperability. The thesis provides a domain-specific requirements analysis, a modular architectural design, and a working prototype that demonstrates the viability of preserving qualitative research artifacts as structured archival objects.

Keywords: None

PDF: Master Thesis

Reference: Tessa Heidkamp. A Web Service Backend for Archiving and Providing QDA Artifacts. Master Thesis. Technische Universit¨Berlin: 2026.