Collaborative session notes:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tYy2rMUI-e6C2IQz_j-Xm_N7Y9-OeLYY/edit#heading=h.z9g0kxbuqmvv
The RDA VP coincides with the first 6 months of the WG workplan and will give us the opportunity to present our preliminary findings and to begin to prepare for future ones.
In its first phase, the WG is working on a landscape analysis of multilingual Controlled Vocabularies (CVs) in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) domain. The WG collects a list of examples or use cases which address the challenges of creating and managing such vocabularies. The WG activities take place in an evolving environment where AI and LLMs present significant possibilities for automation in the creation of large and complex vocabularies. However, especially in the SSH domain which is intertwined with cultural specificities, these technologies still need human verification to ensure both linguistic accuracy and cultural inclusivity. On a more technological side, the examples listed by the WG illustrate the extent and type of management required by the expansion of wide and complex multilingual vocabularies.
The use cases collected offer different strategies to address both the scientific and technical quality of CVs in the SSH. After a presentation of the work done so far, the session will gather feedback from the audience about the use cases and potential addition of new ones. The objectives here are: 1) to validate the first results of our landscape analysis, 2) to complement it with additional insights, and 3) to potentially enrich it with new examples.
In the second part of the session, we will prepare the WG’s next step, which is to establish a first set of recommendations concerning mostly the scientific scope of SSH multilingual vocabularies. This set of recommendations should address the various dimensions of the CVs scientific quality, including human expertise, the type of this expertise, the process of validation, the process of adding one or more languages to existing vocabularies, etc. We expect, with the aid of session participants, to successfully identify best practices and the main pain points. In particular, the session will engage the attendees in providing suggestions from their own experience in translation, vocabulary building, or vocabulary usage.
Although technical recommendations should be listed in the last phase of the WG timespan, any observation or recommendation in that area will be, of course, very much welcomed.
