Speaker
Description
Machine-actionable vocabularies and data definitions—why they matter and how to make your own
Just as dictionaries and glossaries sometimes help you avoid misunderstandings in everyday communications, data dictionaries and data definitions can be used to make systems interoperable. In the spectrum of human-to-system-to-human communications you will find ways of systematically organizing knowledge for subsequent retrieval using “controlled vocabularies”—that is, sets of predefined, authorized terms that have been selected by some governing principles. Controlled vocabularies are used ubiquitously, from systematically recording data for a single research study, to serving as the source of acceptable terms in form fields, to enabling large-scale indexing of inventories, medical literature and research outputs.
During this workshop, you will:
- Learn why you might want to take your vocabularies to the next level, what it means to make them machine-actionable, and how to govern them in simple scenarios
- Practice creating, sharing and using vocabularies following recipes that illustrate the general principles and can scale to real-world applications
