Charter 1 - Best Practices for Authoritative Data Working Group

Charter:

This charter has ended and is not longer active.

Scope & Objectives

This group will explore best practices for authorities that want to share their metadata through a linked data search API.  This work is specifically looking to provide recommendations that allow for the creation of a common toolset that works across authorities supported by different agencies.  The major outcome of this working group will be descriptions of the best practices in an easy to follow document empowering authority providers to create APIs and other deliverables that are compatible with supporting the development of a shared toolset.  Additional documentation may be created providing authority consumers with a consistent pattern for writing tools and consuming authority metadata.

This group should be comprised of a balance of members from multiple authority providers, authority consumers, and tool developers.  Members need to be able to commit to the following deliverables and timeframe.

Addendum:

As the group process unfolded, it became clear that identifying use cases and user stories was necessary first step to insure the space was clearly defined.  We hope that follow-on charters will address some of the original objectives statement.

Deliverables & Timeframe

Anticipated deliverables will include:

• Primary: Documentation of best practices for authority providers creation of linked data search APIs

• Secondary: Documentation of patterns for writing tools and consuming authority metadata

• Review by community of designs and solicitation of feedback

The group will begin meeting in late spring or early summer 2020 (approximately late May or early June).  The group will meet for 1 hour every other week and its sunset date will be approximately 4 months after the start date.  If more time is required, a new working group charter will be created.

Addendum:

As per the adjusted objectives statement, the following are the final set of deliverables for the first charter of the working group.

• Survey Results for Cataloger User Stories
• Cataloger User Stories for Working with Authoritative Data and Supporting Developer and Provider User Stories - This is a final summarization of the work of the first charter of the working group.  User stories are organized into categories of related user stories. And each user story includes the priority as identified in the survey.

Meeting Times & Communication Channels

• The call for participation was sent by invitation to authority providers, authority data consumers, and applications developers that make authority data available to consumers.

• A regular schedule for meetings was set using Doodle.  The selected time is every other Monday at 9am PT, 12pm ET, 6pm CEST starting Monday, June 8.

• Meeting notes recording action items and provisional decisions will be in the LD4P3 wiki linked from this page

• Meetings, meeting minutes, deliverables, and milestones will be announced on LD4 google group, LD4P google group, and Samvera-Tech google group.

• There is a dedicated Slack channel for asynchronous communication at slack: authority_api_wg

• Meetings will take place on Zoom.  See link to meetings below.

Slack channel:  authority_api_wg

Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/97833418638?pwd=WHBKS2hTTzJhYzVOalhQdjVFL2hKdz09

Meeting Notes

• 2020-06-08 Meeting: Introductions and Brainstorming
• 2020-06-22 Meeting: Use Case Identification
• 2020-07-06 Meeting: Refining Use Cases as User Stories
• 2020-08-03 Meeting: Continuing with User Stories (cataloger focused)
• 2020-08-17 Meeting: Continuing with User Stories (cataloger focused)
• 2020-08-31 Meeting: Continuing with User Stories (developer focused)
• 2020-09-14 Meeting: Continuing with User Stories (developer focused)
• 2020-09-28 Meeting: Continuing with User Stories (developer focused)
• 2020-10-26 Meeting: Survey Development & User Stories
• 2020-11-09 Meeting: Provider User Stories
• 2020-11-30 Meeting: Provider User Stories
• 2020-12-14 Meeting: Summary Documents
• 2021-01-25 Final Meeting of First Charter
• 2021-02-01 Final Meeting of First Charter (part 2)

Documents

Working Group Documents

• Current Approaches to Providing Search APIs
• Initial Use Case Definitions - Search API Best Practices for Authoritative Data Working Group
• Needs of Consumers and Applications
  • LC Working Document - Suggest Service 2.0
• Organizing User Stories
• User Stories - Best Practices for Authoritative Data Working Group

Membership

Roles are defined as:

• Provider - member of an authority provider organization
• Consumer - member of an organization consuming authority data
• Developer - technical staff interested in creating tools to work with linked data authorities

Expression of interest:

Working Group has convened.

Members

Facilitator : E. Lynette Rayle (Cornell - Developer)  

1. Nate Trail Kevin Ford  (Library of Congress - Provider)
2. John Chapman Rick Bennett Kirk Hess   (OCLC - Provider)
3. Nancy Fallgren (MeSH - Provider)
4. John Graybeal (BioPortal - Provider, Cedar - Consumer)
5. Tiziana Possemato (ShareVDE - Provider)
6. Lydia Pintscher Jens Uhlig (Wikidata - Provider)
7. Rob Sanderson (Yale - Consumer)
8. Hetty van Zutphen (ISNI - Provider)
9. Steven Folsom  (Cornell - Consumer)
10. Christine Fernsebner Eslao (Harvard - Consumer)
11. Jeremy Nelson Justin Littman  (Stanford - Developer)

Resources

• Making Authorities Accessible as Linked Data - A perspective based on experiences working with Questioning Authority and the QaServer Lookup application which accesses authorities linked data search APIs.