First User Research Workshop on Terminology Services in NFDI4Culture

On July 12, 2022, team members from the Open Science Lab, TIB, co-convened a special meeting of the NFDI4Culture LOD Working Group for a workshop focusing on terminology services. ‘Terminologies’ is used here as an umbrella term to encompass domain-specific vocabularies, thesauri and formal ontologies, the latter preferably represented through Semantic Web specifications (OWL, SKOS, etc). The FAIR principles explicitly state that a formal and common terminology must be used for knowledge representation. An important task for every NFDI consortium is therefore to identify and align their relevant terminologies within the designated communities and beyond to achieve the broadest possible applicability and acceptance.

The workshop featured hands-on exercises with existing terminology services in order to observe how culture community participants interact and make use of such services. Furthermore, the workshop aimed to identify the most widely used vocabulary and ontology resources in the community and discuss what common issues arise when researchers are browsing or looking up terms in these resources. This report summarises findings from the workshop and outlines plans for corresponding service and feature developments in NFDI4Culture.