StandardsCommittee: clarin-eric-standards-committee-meeting_2013-10-21.txt

Minutes of the CLARIN standards committee meeting, Prague, October 20, 2013
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Chair: Andreas Witt
Co-Chair: Karl-Heinz Moerth (not attending due to attendance in parallel meeting)

[Session start at 9:05]

[List of attendees was comiled seperately]


Introduction
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The general goal of the CLARIN standards committee (CSC) is to build a system of interoperable resources and monitor the use of standards within CLARIN activities.

This meeting is the follow-up meeting to Sofia, October 2012.

The session is opened by a introductory round as not only CSC members were present but also some of the national ISOcat and/or metadata coordinators were present.


Meeting agenda
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1 Report on activities in the previous months
2 Dissemination and outreach of standards
3 The role of the CSC
4 Relations with other committees

The CSC group aggreed to put point 4 first.


Relations with other committees
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There are taskforces and working groups within CLARIN that relate to the CSC:

 * the National ISOcat Coordinators group (as described in CE-2013-0189, no meeting up to now)
 * the National Metadata Quality Coordinators group (as described in CE-2013-0189CE-2013-0189, formerly National CMDI Coordinators group, no meeting up to now) 
 * the CLARIN CMDI taskforce (led by Menzo Windhouwer)
 * the CLARIN metadata curation taskforce
 * the CLARIN Center Committee

The exact relation is not always clear. Most of the work is done on the national level. There is only little work on the international level (e.g. no meetings of the ISOcat/MD Quality Coordinators so far).

Due to relatively high proliferation of ISOcat categories and CMDI profiles (new) users are currently lost and need guidance ith respect to evaluating and choosing CMDI profiles for their specific needs.

The CSC sees itself as the apropriate body for establishing and promoting CLARIN approved ISOcat categories and CMDI profiles.

Menzo Windhouwer reports on stalled work within the ISO group responsible for the data categorie registry (DCR). Consequently, the DCR implementation ISOcat was provided with the possibility to tag and group categories. This can be used to establish a CLARIN approved/recommended subset of ISOcat categories.

Ineke Schuurman reports on the work of CLARIN-NL with respect to ISOcat curation. CLARIN-NL is preparing a guide on ISOcat curation which is currently beeing internationalized and will be circulated among the National ISOcat Coordinators group.

Among the national CLARIN projects expertise on (meta)data curation varies greatly. The CSC must find ways to promote national experiences and solutions to the CLARIN ERIC level and thus become the active driving force for guidance and clarification on these issues. This is also the expressed view of the CLARIN ERIC as confirmed by Thorsten Trippel.

To achieve this leading position for the CSC Andreas Witt suggests to extend the scope of the committee and develop in the direction of an "umbrella" organization for the National ISOcat/Metadata Quality Coordinators. Thorsten Trippel agrees to promote this idea to the BoD.

Among the CSC members there is consensus that the committee should be as open as possible to CLARIN members in general. Integrating the National Coordinators would be a first step to more openess of the committee. Proposals and suggestions of the CSC will be establised based on consensus among the committee members and forwarded to the BoD which in turn then formally decides on the those matters. It will be possible to express minority votings to BoD in cases where consensus among the CSC members cannot be achieved.

Specification of the liaision with the Center Committee is postponed.


Report on activities in the previous months
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Andreas Witt briefly reports on the TEI for linguists SIG meeting during this year's TEI Members Meeting in Rome. The SIG is open to collaborate with CLARIN.

Andreas Witt reports on the TC37 SC4 meeting during the annual ISO meeting in Pretoria on June 10-14 2013. The sub-committee currently works on SynAF-2, SemAF, DCR, PISA, metadata protocols and metadata query languages. Collaboration with research infrastructures like CLARIN, DARIAH and TEI is actively encouraged by SC4.

Promoting international standards via the ISO is seen as an important step for CLARIN by most CSC members with respect to the expected long term availablity of standards documents. Andreas Witt will work towards making the content of ISO standards available to CLARIN members free of charge.

The next SC4 meeting will take place in Berlin, June 2014. Andreas Witt will organize a co-located CSC meeting to the ISO meeting. This will probably enable CSC members to attend the ISO meetings as well.


Dissemination and outreach
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The CLARIN standards page (currently hosted at IDS) will be transferred to the CLARIN.eu website. This will provide a sustainable reference point for CLARIN standards on the international level and hopefully fosters development of the standards overview. Thorsten Trippel assures CSC members that creators of resources/documentation that are promoted to the CLARIN ERIC level will always acknowledge the original creators.


The role of the CSC
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The previous discussions touch this question several times. In conclusion from these discussions is that the CSC will initiate a process to propose or discourage the use of standards and promote CLARIN best practices.

[Session closing at 12:02]