Folks:
Planning for workshops and special sessions for DC-2013 in Lisbon is well underway (see http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2013 for the announcement of the conference). This community’s interests are at the ‘core’ of the conference theme:
“DC-2013 will explore questions regarding the persistence, maintenance, and preservation of metadata and descriptive vocabularies. The need for stable representations and descriptions spans all sectors including cultural heritage and scientific data, eGovernment, finance and commerce. Thus, the maintenance and management of metadata is essential to address the long term availability of information of legal, cultural and economic value.
On the web, data—and especially descriptive vocabularies—can change or vanish from one moment to the next. Nonetheless, the web increasingly forms the ecosystem for our vocabularies and our data. DC-2013 will bring together in Lisbon the community of metadata scholars and practitioners to engage in the exchange of knowledge and best practices in developing a sustainable metadata ecosystem.”
This focus provides us with a great opportunity to continue the work begun at DC-2011 in den Haag, where a full day preconference on vocabulary management led to the organization of the DCMI Vocabulary Management Community (see: http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DC-2011_Vocabulary_Special_Session/Meeting_Report for the meeting report of that preconference session), and subsequently followed up at the first face-to-face meeting of the Community in London in 2012. But the planning needs to start now, because what we propose will be used to engage interested participants to come to Lisbon to join us in adding to the base of knowledge and understanding of what it takes to manage vocabularies in the age of the Semantic Web.
Because we’re planning to propose an all-day event, we have some scope for including a variety of topics and sessions of interest to a range of DC-2013 participants. We’d like to divide the day into four parts, with separate topics, leaders, and planning groups to ensure a useful agenda and sufficient detail to bring interested participants together to continue active work on these issues. Each session will consist of a short presentation to set the stage for discussion, a focused discussion to determine whether a work group should be established, with leader, goals, and action items identified.
Some topics that we’ve identified already based on the meeting report from DC-2011 and subsequent discussion include (in no particular order):
1. Vocabulary sustainability, including criteria for determining sustainability, what kind of measures could be taken to increase the likelihood that vocabularies will survive, what can be done about ‘orphan’ vocabularies, and whether a role can be taken on by DCMI.
2. Multilingual vocabulary development and extension, including applicable standards and examples, with the possibility of developing some best practices.
3. Extending element and value vocabularies in service of specialized communities. This topic in particular cries out for best practices.
4. Making mapping real, in a variety of contexts. This is the topic that may be the best candidate for some ‘hands-on’ activities to surface some of the issues that arise as we go from talking to doing. One idea is to supply some exercises beforehand, for discussion and perhaps some ‘voting’ similar to that in vogue on sites such as the BBC Your Paintings project (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/). In addition to being fun, these exercises should enable some collating of issues seen in the contributions, as well as (of course) some progress towards guidelines.
The last two of these topics are also of interest to the DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group, so this session will be co-organized with that community.
FROM YOU:
1. Discussion of these topics and others will allow us to make final decisions about the topics (deadline for discussion: Feb. 25)
2. We’ll need nominations (including self-nomination) for planning committees for each of these topics, as well as discussion leaders (deadline for nominations: Mar. 17). Nominations should be sent directly to Diane at [log in to unmask], and please include what you think the nominee can contribute.
3. From there we will be able to meet the deadline for proposing sessions (Mar. 29), as well as get a good head start on planning for these sessions in Lisbon.
Please do get involved with this effort!
Diane Hillmann
Interim Moderator, DCMI Vocabulary Management Community
Gordon Dunsire
Co-Leader, DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group
