Vocabulary Services Interest Group Charter Proposal

10 Mar 2015

Vocabulary Services Interest Group Charter Proposal

Draft Charter

The Vocabulary Service Interest Group (VSIG) seeks to develop community-based recommendations on approaches to publication of controlled vocabularies on the web. Community standard controlled vocabularies are used in metadata annotation and labelling data files to solve problems of ambiguity associated with data markup and also enabling records to be interpreted by computers. This opens up data sets to a whole world of possibilities for computer aided manipulation, distribution and long term reuse. The recommendations of the Vocabulary Service Interest Group will address the needs of research communities for using controlled vocabularies published on the web. The Interest Group aims to represent all stakeholders involved in the controlled vocabulary lifecycle in research domains: content producers; maintainers; and consumers. Discussions topics will include, but are not necessarily be limited to: vocabulary representation; reuse; curation; and interlinking or mapping. These discussions will allow the Interest Group to propose solutions allowing the cross-domain use of vocabularies, including mapping relationships between domains. This Interest Group will help to promote good practices by producers and consumers of controlled vocabularies. The Interest Group will develop a timeline for activities as they form.

Objectives

VSIG will survey vocabulary efforts from related communities and provide a summary report on existing practices
VSIG will identify common terminology in the context of vocabulary publication
VSIG will identify common functionality for vocabulary publication services
VSIG will collect and report on use cases from the research community regarding using published vocabularies and vocabulary services
VSIG will develop recommendations for vocabulary publication services

Activities

bi-monthly telecons/webex to initiate the activities of the IG and develop a timeline and plan for producing deliverables defined in this charter’s objectives
meeting notes and whitepapers to be publicly available via the RDA wiki

Relationship to other RDA interest- and working-groups

The VSIG will coordinate with RDA interest / groups that have common interests in vocabulary publication and usage.

Data Foundations and Terminology IG
- VSIG will work with the Data Foundations and Terminology IG to discuss how data objects defined using data models can be associated with terms from research controlled vocabularies.
Metadata IG
- VSIG will work with the Metadata IG to discuss common interest in how vocabulary terms me be utilized in research data metadata and in recommendations for metadata about controlled vocabularies.
RDA/WDS Publishing Data IG
- VSIG will work with the RDA/WDS Publishing Data IG to discuss common interest in utilizing controlled vocabularies in the publication of research data
Domain Repositories IG
- VSIG will work with the Domain Repositories IG to discuss common interest in controlled vocabulary terms utilization in domain repositories

Participants

Name	Email	Organization	Title	Field / Area of Interest	Role
Stephan Zednik	zednis2@rpi.edu	RPI	Sr. Software Engineer	Semantic Web	co-chair
Simon Cox	simon.cox@csiro.au	CSIRO	Research Scientist	Earth and environmental sciences, semantic web	co-chair
Adam Shepherd	ashepherd@whoi.edu	WHOI			co-chair
Adam Leadbetter	adam.leadbetter@marine.ie	Marine Institute (Galway, Ireland)	Team Leader for Data Management	Publishing vocabulary services, Content governance for marine science vocabularies	co-chair
Patrick West	westp@rpi.edu	RPI	Principal Software Engineer	Semantic Web	participant
Marshall X Ma	max7@rpi.edu	RPI	Associate Research Scientist	Semantic Web, Data Science	participant
Cyndy Chandler	cchandler@whoi.edu	WHOI	Information Systems Specialist	Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry	participant
Frances Lightsom	flightsom@usgs.gov	U.S. Geological Survey	Ocean Data Ambassador	Environmental data management	participant
Louise Darroch	lorr@bodc.ac.uk	BODC			participant
Rebecca Koskela	rkoskela@unm.edu	UNM	Executive Director, DataONE		participant
Matthew Jones	jones@nceas.ucsb.edu	NCEAS/UCSB			participant
Dr. Adrian Burton	adrian.burton@ands.org.au	Australian National Data Service	Director, Services	National Research Infrastructure	participant
Stephen Richard	steve.richard@azgs.az.gov	Arizona Geological Survey	Chief Geoinformatics Section	Geoscience vocabularies, SKOS, XML, interoperability	participant
Arthur Smith	apsmith@aps.org	American Physical Society	Lead Data Analyst	physics	participant
Robert Groman	rgroman@whoi.edu	Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution	Information Systems Specialist	Data Management	participant
Jane Frazier	jane.frazier@ands.org.au	Australian National Data Service	Data Librarian	Metadata	participant
Jonathan Yu	jonathan.yu@csiro.au	CSIRO	Senior Experimental Scientist	Computer science, Semantic web, Ontologies, spatial data infrastructures, web services	participant
Robert Thomas	room@bodc.ac.uk	British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC)	Marine Data Scientist	Oceanographic data management and vocabularies	participant
Gema Bueno-de-la-Fuente	gbueno@bib.uc3m.es	iSchool, University Carlos III of Madrid	Assistant Professor	digital libraries, vocabularies, open data	participant
Herbert Schentz	Herbert.schentz@umweltbundesamt.at	Umweltbundesamt GmbH (environment agency Austria (EAA))		semantics, semantic data integration	participant
Dr. Kim Finney	kimtfinney@gmail.com	FiNK Data	Director	Data Management; Ontologies	participant