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

[Twan Goosen]

Dear all,

Thanks to those who filled in the doodle. Since most of the 'regulars'
have filled it by now in and moreover I get the impression that many of
us are already getting our calendars filled up rapidly for the next
month, I decided to close it a bit earlier than announced. So we will
have our next meeting on:

	Thursday 12 September 10:00 - 11:00 CEST

Hope this works for others interested as well. In any case you are
welcome to join in! I will share an agenda and Zoom link in the first
week of September.

Best,
Twan

On 14/08/2019 15:04, Twan Goosen wrote:
> 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