PARSEC: Vocabularies need to be trusted and usable

This session was organized as a co-located meeting during RDS Plenary 17 in support of the PARSEC project. 

To maximize semantic interoperability of our data the use of shared or harmonized terminology is essential, particularly where the data comes from multiple communities and from many countries. The term ‘vocabulary’ is used to denote any semantic asset containing terms and information about those terms, including value sets (i.e., bag of terms, term list), controlled-vocabularies, glossaries, thesauri, and taxonomies, and potentially even concept maps, ontologies, and knowledge graphs. With the increasing uptake of the semantic web, vocabularies and other semantic resources are proliferating. Researchers are becoming confused as to which one they should use, and more importantly, which ones they can trust. And where it can be shown that a vocabulary does not exist, what is best practice in developing, maintaining and sustaining one.

RDA Session Information

Notes (Google) also attached here.

Recording (YouTube)

Agenda

Trust: 

• Lesley Wyborn and Simon Hodson: the 4 key dimensions of quality in a vocabulary: scientific validity, technical structure, stewardship and access.

Repository Delivery:

• Siddeswara Guru: Use of vocabularies in repositories

• Margaret O’Brien:  Repositories role in helping to select the most useful vocabularies.

Usable by Researchers:

• Romain David: Researcher efforts to develop data dictionaries that align to vocabularies
• Alison Specht: Systematic approach for researchers to create and use robust and community-standard vocabularies.