[Tf-curation] Virtual meeting on CMDI best practices and related matters

[Twan Goosen]

Dear all,

I hope that you all have enjoyed or are still enjoying a nice summer
break. As promised I'm sending out a doodle for picking a date for our
first virtual meeting on (more or less) ongoing CMDI affairs and to
prepare a bit for the upcoming annual CLARIN conference (30/9 - 2/10 in
Leipzig):

<https://doodle.com/poll/uizzk5syrr5hpamm>

I will try to pick a date and prepare an agenda in the first week of
September.

Enjoy the remainder of August and hope to see many of you in September -
virtually or else later in Leipzig!

Best,
Twan

On 30/05/2019 13:54, Twan Goosen wrote:
> Dear CMDI and metadata curation task force members,
> 
> Last week a number of CMDI & metadata curation related meetings were
> held and since many of you were not able to attend, I thought it would
> be good to provide a summary of the main topics discussed at these
> meetings and the current state of the various tasks. Furthermore, I need
> to give an update on the planning for the upcoming period as there are
> several factors affecting our usual rhythm of meetings and work on these
> tasks. To start with the latter:
> 
> # General planning #
> 
> As some of you may have heard already, Menzo is currently dealing with
> health related issues and it is not yet clear exactly when he will be
> able to resume work. We all wish him a speedy recovery but chances are
> that this will require a substantial amount of time and energy on his
> part. Not having Menzo's expertise, coordination, implementation and
> knowledge propagation skills at our disposal for an as-yet-unknown
> amount of time is obviously going to have an impact on our productivity
> as task forces and we will have to change our plans and ambitions
> accordingly for the time being.
> 
> A second factor, which should only affect planning on the relatively
> short term, is the fact that I will be mostly absent for three months
> starting next week. I will be out of office and working very limited
> hours, leaving little time to do substantial work on most tasks beyond
> urgent matters, providing support and keeping myself informed about
> ongoing activities. Therefore the best option, which we have also
> discussed in our call last week, seems to be to suspend our usual
> meeting schedule until after the summer months - that is, have our next
> meeting in September. To plan for this, I will try to send out a doodle
> in the second half of August. More on this towards the end of this mail.
> 
> # Meetings report #
> 
> Now for the report on the meetings: on 21 and 22 May we had the Centre
> Meeting. On the second day of the event we had three CMDI themed
> sessions on the programme; the day after the Centre Meeting, we had a
> scheduled video conference on CMDI best practices and related tasks. I
> will report on the four (sub)meetings one by one below:
> 
> ## Future of CMDI session @ centre meeting ##
> 
> The purpose of this session was to brainstorm on various CMDI related
> topics that go beyond ongoing developments and other 'current affairs'.
> 
> Presentations:
> 1. "Past and present of CMDI" as a general introduction/warming-up [1]
> 2. A 'pitch' for all topic suggestions (mainly prepared by Menzo and me) [2]
> 
> The main topics that were discussed (at least the ones for which I have
> notes):
> 
> * Cues for tools/auto values: functionality is being built on top of
> this both at HuC (Netherlands) and in CLARINO (Comedi editor). Some kind
> synchronisation is needed.
> 
> * CMDI & FAIR: Fair Principle I2 requires the use of 'FAIR
> vocabularies'. Currently many CMD elements do not link to (good quality)
> concepts. Vocabularies that can be considered FAIR are not really used.
> Suggestion: perhaps we should open up the metadata infrastructure to use
> of (selected) external vocabularies and concepts? This should be
> investigated carefully. A proposal will be prepared and is expected to
> be ready for discussion in a first draft stage at annual conference.
> 
> * General interoperability is something to keep focussing on. An
> analysis of most used profiles would be helpful?
> 
> ## Joint TFs meeting @ centre meeting ##
> 
> Not many task force 'regulars' attended this meeting so as was the case
> at previous centre meetings it was mainly a session to present and
> discuss previous and ongoing work of the task forces.
> 
> Presentation:
> - Overview of recent work in task force [3]
> 
> One interesting was made in relation to the best practice guide:
> Koenraad remarked that there might be a need for easy work flows and
> general guidance for metadata modelling and authoring rather than very
> extensive best practices. More or less like some repositories are
> offering already for authoring/curation (easy metadata creation and
> management) but on the modelling site things are still a bit rough.
> Would be good to gather some more insights (survey?) and if it is deemed
> strategically important we can also increase the priority of this aspect.
> 
> Work on the third part of CMDI standardisation (ISO 24622-3 'Recommended
> Components') was presented. It would be good if this work and the group
> of people involved would be represented on an (internal) page to
> increase the visibility of the initiative a bit.
> 
> Many of those present volunteered to test the Common use cases
> questionnaire and some provided feedback at the end of the session.
> 
> Also see document with agenda & notes [4].
> 
> ## Curation hands on @ centre meeting ##
> 
> There is not much to report on for this session. Quite a few people
> attended and I presented Menzo's overview of available curation tools
> from last year. Wolfgang and Can (the ACDH curation module developers)
> were present and helped discussing and explaining how the curation
> module can be applied for curation purposes. We looked at various
> collections from the centres represented around the table and thus
> (hopefully) demonstrated the things providers can do themselves to check
> the quality and fitness of their own metadata.
> 
> ## CMDI best practices video conference ##
> 
> First thing to mention is that Susanne has left the task forces to focus
> on her other tasks, Andreas is taking over from Susanne (also in the CCR
> coordinators group).
> 
> * Common use cases: Andreas will look at the feedback from the centre
> meeting;
> * CLARIN Annual conference: for the annual bazaar booth, we will prepare
> on the spot opportunity to fill in the questionnaire (laptops), flyers
> with URL/QR-code, a registration list for a reminder and a
> banner/poster. Andreas will make a design for flyers and a poster.
> * CMDI ISO pt3: Oddrun will get in touch with Maria about joining the
> effort on (standardisation of) recommended components. For a summary of
> activities in the ISO pt3 group, see below.
> 
> Notes can also be found on the meeting page [5].
> 
> ### CMDI ISO pt3 update
> 
> We have several meetings over the last few weeks with a group of 5~10
> people. Here's a summary (based on notes by Maria) of the current status
> and approach:
> 
> The normative part of the draft will contain the basic principles and
> the guidelines which would aid the users in the processing of deciding
> which metadata they should use for the description of their language
> resources. These include:
> - the criteria for selecting a specific component/element and the
> consequences the use of this component/element would have in the life
> cycle of a resource
> - the impact factor, i.e. how significant/useful a component/element is.
> For the calculation of the impact factor we will use the VLO and
> Component Registry as initial information sources. We can also use
> interviews (within SSHOC) to extend coverage beyond CLARIN, e.g.
> META-SHARE but also beyond language technology (broader SSH domain).
> We will focus on components that are significant to our domain (LRs, LT
> and SSH) in particular. We will not deal with metadata that are already
> covered by other initiatives and are already standardised or considered
> best practices (e.g. technical); we will reserve a slot for them and
> refer to the related initiatives.
> Maria, Penny and Twan are gathering data with some external assistance
> from Matej.
> 
> The next CMDI ISO pt3 meeting will take place early June.
> 
> # Outlook for next 3-6 months
> 
> As stated above, no CMDI task force or best practices meeting will be
> scheduled during the summer months. Previously discussed TODOs and other
> activities can of course continue to be worked on. There may still be
> some curation activities but I will leave the initiative to Matej and
> other curation task force members.
> 
> I will send around a doodle for a next meeting according to the "Best
> practices and related activites" scheme mid August, with the meeting to
> be held ideally in the first half of September. I expect the main topics
> to be the state of the common use cases and recommended components
> activities and preparation for the annual conference.
> 
> The main CMDI related activities at the annual conference (30 September
> - 2 October in Leipzig) will be:
> * Presence at bazaar (as task forces/best practices group)
> * Task forces meeting
> * Discussing the use of external concepts and vocabularies within CMDI
> * Possibly a separate meeting on CMDI ISO pt3/recommended components
> 
> That's it. My apologies for the very long e-mail but there was quite a
> lot to report on. I hope to see many of you soon again after the summer
> and wish you all productive and pleasant months in the meantime! I will
> regularly be reading e-mail and will also try to be present on Slack so
> feel free to contact me through those channels at any time :)
> 
> Best,
> Twan
> 
> P.S. I can recommend the #cmdi channel in the CLARIN Slack [6] as a
> place to discuss CMDI, curation and all related matters while we are not
> meeting in an organised way. If you don't have an account for the CLARIN
> Slack yet, let me know and I will invite you for one.
> 
> [1]
> https://trac.clarin.eu/attachment/wiki/Taskforces/CMDI/Meeting20190522/20190522_future_of_cmdi_intro.pdf
> [2]
> https://trac.clarin.eu/attachment/wiki/Taskforces/CMDI/Meeting20190522/20190522_future_of_cmdi_topics.pdf
> [3]
> https://trac.clarin.eu/raw-attachment/wiki/Taskforces/CMDI/Meeting20190522/20190522_cmdi_curation_tf_meeting.pdf
> [4]
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1El7T8kqg5xDNux7xYIgqbXraR4BOC_mAoQNXNnUra1g/edit#heading=h.n65jvc13llu2
> [5] https://trac.clarin.eu/wiki/Taskforces/CMDI/Meeting20190523#Notes
> [6] https://clarineric.slack.com/messages/C1D7WK882
> 

-- 
Twan Goosen
Software developer at CLARIN ERIC
www.clarin.eu | twan at clarin.eu