We're anticipating that the recording of the Thursday meetings in London (April 26th, 2012) will become available within the next week or so. The Seminar will be up soon after that. Apologies for the delay, but the volunteers doing the work are busy people, and scheduling of editing facilities can be difficult.

I'm going to propose a couple of work items based on the discussions we've been having in this venue and in London, with an eye to getting some additional conversations going (and commitments made) prior to the summer hiatus. Keep in mind that I'm putting these out as proposals, and would really welcome suggestions, comments, arguments, etc. This is not a one-woman show, I know I'm talking to a very knowledgeable group, and I'm not going to be happy with silence! In London we had two major topics on our agenda, but as those of you who were present can attest (and the rest will see when the recordings are available), there was a great deal of wide-ranging discussion once the topics were introduced. I'm going to try to reflect those discussions in these proposals, but I welcome other views of what I may have misinterpreted, left out, or poorly explained.

Work Item 1: Develop plan for a set of best practice guidelines around vocabulary evaluation, selection, and re-use. Many of the relevant questions around these processes were articulated at the Special session in The Hague [1], and the Task Group's responsibility is to use these discussions to set up an outline for needed best practices documentation, as well as reviewing, evaluating and annotating any extant guidelines now available (particularly those consulted in their work). This group should be prepared to submit a discussion draft for the plan and outline to this group (preferably on the wiki) by the end of this calendar year, and a fully articulated plan and outline by the following Spring (March 31st?). The model I have in mind is the best practices guidelines for OAI Data Providers [2], which had a considerable number of participants (and as many opinions) but still resulted in useful and coherent documentation, but there are certainly others worth consulting.

Work Item 2: Examine and articulate the issues around vocabulary sustainability and preservation and what role DCMI should play in this area. In a sense, sustainability is one of the criteria for evaluating vocabularies for use, but in a larger sense it's a critical issue for both vocabulary owners and the larger metadata community. At the London meeting, Bernard Vatant discussed some of his work, including an idea for a Vocabulary Commons, also featured in several of his blog posts. [3] [4] [5] For this item, we ask the Task Group to follow up on these ideas and initial discussions, and lead a discussion in this community intended to result in a recommendation for action by DCMI.

Work Item 3: Develop a set of best practices for extending vocabularies for local use. One of the common problems we find when looking around at metadata using DC is that implementers have little guidance about what to do when they wish to extend DC or use DC terms in conjunction with local terms. The resulting documentation could be part of the user documentation currently being updated. [6]