Controlled Vocabulary Working Group - 2013

1. Controlled Vocabulary Working Group - 2013 Presented by John Porter

2. Goal • Make it easy for researchers to find the data they need from LTER repositories by • Enhancing searches through the use of a thesaurus that provides synonyms, narrower terms and related terms • Creating a browseable structure for locating datasets

3. 2013 Goals • Enhance term list to incorporate: • New terms suggested by sites • Frequently searched terms • Frequently used terms • Terms related to human activities (social science) • More synonyms for existing terms that are found in LTER Metadata • Needed: Establish clear criteria for evaluating candidate terms • Best Practices

4. Goals • Add definitions for terms in the Controlled Vocabulary • Create plans for dealing with taxonomic names and places that are currently not part of the existing Controlled Vocabulary

5. Workshop – May 2013 • Pre-Workshop • Queried LTER Sites for new candidate terms – Melendez, Henshaw, Vanderbilt • Queried existing documents for words not currently in the Controlled Vocabulary – Gastil-Buhl • Queried logs for search terms used by Metacat users - Costa • Updated Tematres software to the latest version - Porter • Identified online sources for definitions – O’Brien, Vanderbilt • Investigated taxonomic web services and gazetteers – Gries • Note: the group favors using Taxonomic and Geographic Coverage elements rather than keywords for these elements

6. Workshop Participants 2013 • LTER Information Managers • Margaret O’Brien, Kristen Vanderbilt, Donald Henshaw and John Porter • Professional Librarians from UVA: • Sherry Lake and Ivey Glendon • Added a lot to our discussions • “about” vs. “contains” taxonomies • our focus is describing what datasets contain • “about” is much harder to define for data

7. Workshop Results 2013 • New Terms • ~ 230 terms were suggested by 4 sites • ~ 75 terms were accepted and added to LTER Vocabulary • Reason for rejection was given for each term not added • ~ 25 additional terms were added based on use at 3 or more LTER Sites or 2 or more sites with > 10 datasets • ~ Several suggested terms were added as non-preferred (UF) terms • Definitions • 309 new definitions added

8. Controlled Vocabulary Status • 710 total preferred terms • 200 synonyms (“use for” terms) • 363 total definitions

9. Important Workshop Activities - 2013 • Developed improved Best Practices for identifying additional terms for inclusion (http://im.lternet.edu/VocabBestPractices) • Including a table that lays out grounds for rejecting particular words

11. Vision • Refining the “Vision” for how the controlled vocabulary can be used to make PASTA and other NIS elements more effective • And link to other efforts such as DataOne, LODE and EnvThes • Optional workshop yesterday – tasks identified: • Identify systems and software tools that effectively exploit controlled vocabularies for searching/browsing and ranking • Metrics tools: help identify specific datasets that could benefit from additional keywords

12. Help us out! • During discussions today and tomorrow, think about how the Controlled Vocabulary can be leveraged • Incorporate terms from the Controlled Vocabulary into your site EML documents • ASK us if you need help!!!!! – we have tools