[Tf-curation] Planning and report on CMDI/curation meetings and activities

Thu May 30 12:54:24 CEST 2019

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