Vocabularies Event March 2012

Practicalities
Registration: is required and may be completed at http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/events/register.php?id=293.

Tag: #escsvoc

When: March 7th 2012 from 10am to 4pm

Where: Maple House, Birmingham (walking distance from New Street Station). Directions (pdf)

Lunch: will be provided

Organised by: Adam Cooper, Director of JISC CETIS, member of the Information Standards Board for education skills and Children's services and Champion of its Vocabularies SIG.

Scope of the Meeting and Intended Audience
Vision: A wide spectrum of education and childrens services sector-relevant vocabularies are easily findable and in a form that fosters use (re-use): from linked data and in databases; for statistical and regulatory data exchanges; for discovery of various kinds of resource and diverse other uses.

This will be an open meeting to bring together people who share a desire to increase the availability, access and reuse of vocabularies (code or term lists etc) in machine-readable forms and published to persistent locations on the web. It is being organised in association with the Vocabularies SIG of the Information Standards Board for education, skills and children's services.

The emphasis of the meeting is on existing vocabularies. Given past experience of thwarted ambition in the realm of sector vocabularies, we will be avoiding: definition of new vocabularies; vocabulary definition theory; pros/cons of particular technical formats/representations; governance; mapping and cross-walk.

Attendees, who will have an interest in practical action, will generally fit into at least one of three categories: people who have vocabularies they wish to make more available; people who need existing vocabularies to expressed in an appropriate technical format with suitable persistent locations and identifiers; people with the technical expertise to realise the vision.

Agenda
Arrival, Coffee from 9:45am to 10:15am

Morning Session:
 * 10:15am - Welcome and introduction (Adam Cooper)
 * 10:30am - Round table self-introductions; what is your motivation for coming (All)
 * 11:00am - Motivating pitches - 5 (approx) people make a case for action or an appeal (see below)
 * Midday - Discussion and recording of consensus and disagreement on priorities (vocabularies, general initiatives, not limited to the pitches)

Lunch in the Restaurant from 1:15pm to 2:00pm

Afternoon Session:
 * 2:00pm - Defining requirements; putting shape to a corpus of machine-readable persistently addressable vocabularies and the anticipated role of data.gov.uk
 * 2:40pm - Table-top discussions and reporting back on next actions, including offers of practical work
 * 3:45pm - close
 * 4:00pm - come and talk to us about the ISB Vocabularies SIG and how to engage (Adam Cooper/Helen Challinor)

In-session coffee breaks are not timetabled; a short "comfort break" will be called at an appropriate time and ad hoc recharging of cups will be the order of the day.

For the "motivating pitches", we have offers from
 * Alan Paull (APS)
 * Tim Dumbleton-Thomas(LSIS)
 * Andy Youell/new colleague (HESA)
 * Mike Collett (Schemeta)
 * Ian Piper (Tellura)

Background and Input Material
''Let me know if you would like to include a reference to a report, blog post etc that relates to the event. a.r.cooper@bolton.ac.uk''


 * "[[media:LSIS-extendingtheSfL-CetisEvent070312TD.pdf| Extending the SfL Core Curriculum]]" by Tim Dumbleton, LSIS
 * JISC Linked Data Horizon Scan by Paul Miller