Metadata Working Group launch!
James Myers
Dataverse Community Members:
Following up on Mercè's announcement of the launch of the Flexible Metadata Working Group, we'd like to provide some information on how to join and participate, announce some initial discussion topics, and provide at least some initial thoughts on how the WG can be most effective.
Logistics:
Meetings: As a first step, we're looking to identify a weekly time(s) when group members are able to meet. We've created a Doodle poll to see what time slots might work and WG members should vote for their preferences: https://doodle.com/poll/4e8i9bb5msd6wn33?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link. Depending on how well these initial times work for the community, we may add more (since most are US/Euro-centric with the exception of times around the existing 'Community Meeting 1' timeslot.) Note that the options at the community meeting times would be to hold meetings on the alternate weeks and/or to start at the end of the community call. We will also have the ability to schedule one-off meetings at other times that could be selected based on the WG members interested in a particular topic.
Discussion: While we expect to announce some of the WG's activities and progress on the broad Dataverse mailing list (this one) and at the community meetings, we're setting up a GDCC Slack instance that can have a channel(s) supporting the working group. To be invited, add your name to the Dataverse Metadata Working Group Member List in the Google folder listed immediately below.
Documents: Meeting notes and other documents can be added to a Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M5OaWdVcbGzFvJo3fVs2vvn7NjCT4VvK?usp=sharing. (Note that only people on the dataverse...@googlegroups.com mailing list have access - contact us if someone else needs access and cannot join this list).
Initial Topics
There are a wide range of metadata topics that this WG could/should address. To start, GDCC leadership has identified a few topics where there is current community activity and an expectation that outcomes from WG discussion would be integrated into ongoing work in the near term. As part of the WG discussion, we also hope to identify additional specific topics as well as longer-term directions/strategies for metadata.
For the topics below, we will work with interested parties to develop meeting agendas and goals for each topic (we have some people to contact, but feel free to inform/remind us of your interest if you'd like to be involved in planning for a given topic).
· Code/Container Metadata - capabilities to support reproducible research and the connections between data and software/computational codes
· Registry/Remote Store Metadata - the ability to document the relationship of Datasets/Datafiles represented in Dataverse with dataset/file resources managed by other systems and supporting Dataverse's use as a Registry
· FAIR Vocabularies - the ability to leverage standard community vocabularies within Dataverse and to limit metadata entries to values from those vocabularies
Process and Goals
While this is probably a topic for discussion itself, I'll just note a few things to get started:
· with the breadth of metadata topics, the goals for the group related to a given topic may range from setting some general directions to making concrete recommendations and coordinating community work,
· the group is open and respectful communication is expected,
· the overall goal of the group is to improve/enhance Dataverse for the community and hence the focus needs to be on practical/maintainable updates to Dataverse that address community needs broadly. We expect the group to include discussions between and within groups of users/stakeholders and developers to help create coherent requirements, use cases, and/or design options,
· the group will consider existing work(s) and new ideas, and how they might be generalized/combined,
· the group itself does not have resources and cannot commit to specific developments, so its role is to inform the GDCC and community members about possibilities and options so that those stakeholders can make plans.
Cheers,
-- Jim
Jim Myers, on behalf of the GDCC