20210511 Scientific Board Meeting Minutes

Owned by Hilde Orten (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 21, 2021
6 min read

Present: Ingo Barkow, Darren Bell, Jared Lyle, Hilde Orten, Flavio Rizzolo, Carsten Thiel, Wendy Thomas, Joachim Wackerow

 Apologies: Simon Hodson

Agenda topics:

0 Buget coordination meeting with the SB

Ingo and Hilde have been invited to take part in a budget coordination meeting with the Excecutive Board to take place on June 9th. Ingo will not be available at the assigned time. At the meeting it was decided that Darren represents the Scientific Board at the budget coordination meeting together with Hilde.

1 Scientific Plan preparation work

At the last meeting of the Scientific Board three groups were formed to work on input for the Scientific Plan, based on the Strategic Actions of the draft Strategic Plan of the Executive Board and the Working Groups plans.

Group 1 (Flavio and Hilde): Strategic Actions, Point 2 - Maintaining multiple lines of specifications and controlled vocabularies.

Group 2 (Carsten and Darren): Strategic Actions, Point 3 -  Improvement of interoperable and distributed DDI infrastructure for use and reuse of DDI resources. Adding useful components around the specifications for users.

Group 3 (Ingo and Wendy): Strategic Actions, Point 4 - Registries/-repositories

Information about the work tasks for the groups can be found here.

At the meeting the outcome of the work of each group was discussed. Comments made at the meeting are included in the notes below:

Group 1 Strategic Actions, Point 2 - Maintaining multiple lines of specifications and controlled vocabularies.

Flavio and Hilde explained the work of Group 1 Link to group work.

a.       Offering stable specifications and controlled vocabularies (reference Work Products)

Flavio pointed out that stability of products over time as well as backward compatibility is important.

Issues around the life of DDI Codebook was raised. Jared pointed out that it is important for the users to reduce uncertainty around codebook as much as possible. Achim means it is important to maintain Codebook regarding bugs. For major functionality an approach could be to call for requests for the SB to look at. Flavio suggests that new functionality might be solved by migration paths.

Flavio suggests that a plan for the Scientific Board in the coming year would be to discuss and provide directions on TC’s plan for product lifecycle management.

b.      Ensuring portability of DDI metadata between specifications and to outside specifications (i.e. mapping between specifications, re-use of elements of other specifications)

Two groups are currently working on portability related issues: The TC and the MRT. The MRT is actively engaged in this task. A short term goal for the Scientific Board could be to define a roadmap for portability, while more details could be added on the medium term. This was agreed at the meeting. Flavio raised a question if it would be useful to have an individual group to work on this on a medium term basis.

c.       Enable DDI specifications to adapt to changes in information technologies and languages (XML Schema, OWL/RDF-S, Schema.org, ...)

Flavio and Hilde suggested not to include this as a point in the scientific plan. Achim and Ingo suggested to have code snippets that could be included in Implementation guidelines. This suggestion should be part of the Scientific Plan (Strategic action point 3 c).

d.      Improve modular approach of specifications to enable the use of functional parts of specifications (from monolithic to modular design). Enable use of parts of specifications together with third party specifications.

Flavio and Hilde presented this as an important goal to include in the Scientific Plan. This was agreed at the meeting.

e.       Production testing/validation for quality assurance

A question was raised about what the COGS tool can and cannot do. Can it be used for testing, and how suitable is it for use by different the products?

Achim mentioned that both testing of the specification and testing of instances are important. He mentioned W3C as a good example of how a specification is published together with test cases.

Achim and Flavio suggested for the Scientific Board to discuss and define a policy for testing of specifications and instances. It was agreed at the meeting to make this an agenda point for the immediate term of the Scientific Plan.

f.        Improve documentation. Integrate with examples and best practices guidelines. Make documentation usable from a training and self-teaching perspective

This is an agreed short and longer term goal. It was also agreed that collaboration between the Working Groups is important to achieve good documentation, for example regarding work related to web-site content.

g.       Providing test cases and an automated test framework for ensuring quality and robustness of main purposes of specifications.

Flavio and Hilde suggested not to include this as a point in the Scientific Plan.

h.      Maintaining a development and research project (like DDI Moving Forward) to explore new features and technical platforms. All specifications might benefit from such a laboratory environment. The idea is to separate concerns of development/research from the concerns of creating stable specifications.

This needs planning by the Scientific Board. At the meeting it was agreed to include planning of a laboratory environment as a point of the Scientific Plan.

Carsten raised a general point regarding the preparation of the Scientific Plan, that it would have been better to start by identifying the strategic points for the plan first, and then move to the working group tasks, rather than doing all in one operation, as has been the case this time due to time pressure. This will be considered as an approach for the next plan.

Group 2 Strategic Actions, Point 3 -  Improvement of interoperable and distributed DDI infrastructure for use and reuse of DDI resources. Adding useful components around the specifications for users

Carsten and Darren explained the work of Group 2 Link to group work.

a.       Guidance on which DDI specification and which parts of DDI for specific use cases

There was a general agreement at the meeting that this is an important topic for the Scientific Plan.

b. Introduce validation rules and related tools, testing support, and mechanisms for using specific subsets of specifications for the purpose of interoperability

Carsten and Darren suggest not to include this in the Scientific Plan, as it is not clear that DDI itself has the resource to commit to this type of activity, and tools are more likely to be built by the community.

c. Implementation guides to help software architects and developers i.e. choosing the appropriate subset of a specification

There was a general agreement at the meeting that this is an important topic for the Scientific Plan.

d. Maintaining a platform for specific subsets of specifications for main usage purposes

Carsten and Darren suggest not to include this in the Scientific Plan. This is dependent on a. and c. that both should have priority for the Scientific Plan.

e. Technical DDI services, especially resolution of DDI URNs to the physical location of DDI resources (identified by URLs)

Carsten and Darren suggest to give this top priority for the Scientific Plan, as the system is broken in some areas to the extent that interoperability of content is not really achievable at the moment. This was agreed at the meeting.

f. Standardized query/exchange protocol enables building repositories and reuse of DDI metadata in the web

Carsten and Darren suggest to include this in the Scientific Plan. The statement, however, needs detailed operational specifications and is completely dependent on the infrastructure implemented in e.

g. Best practices for using all components together

Carsten and Darren suggest not to include this in the Scientific Plan, as this is very vague and related to the TC workplan.

Group 3 Strategic Actions, Point 4 - Registries/-repositories

Ingo and Wendy explained the work of Group 3 Link to group work.

a.       Specify DDI's vision of building DDI into Common Data Element registries (Strategic Plan & Vision)

b.      Identify ways for establishing portals for supporting existing and growing DDI metadata repositories

c.       Leveraging technologies of topic 2 above, especially standard query and exchange protocols/interfaces

Ingo and Wendy meant that a. and c. would be long term goals, while c. would be a topic for the Scientific Plan.

Achim explained that there is interest in having a registry of content. Both validation tools, URN and exchange protocols would be needed in order to have a working system. The DDI Alliance could provide basis for this, but a partner would be needed to provide content.

Achim and Flavio suggested for the Scientific Plan to contain a task for the Scientific Board to prepare a plan for this and to identify building blocks. A short term goal could be to provide an architecture for this. This is important for the DDI to make up part of a global metadata infrastructure. This was agreed at the meeting.

2  Budget preparation planning 

Each year, the DDI Executive Board considers funding requests to support Alliance activities.  Any working group or committee (in addition to individual members) may submit a funding request for the Executive Board to consider.  The Scientific Board will be involved in the evaluation of incoming requests related to scientific and technical activities, see the related DDI Alliance web-page. The deadline for inputting requests for the FY22 to the secretariat is May 24th.

Ingo suggested to apply for funding for a physical meeting of the Scientific Board in April or May 2022. This was approved at the meeting. Dagstuhl workshops were also agreed as important candidates for funding.

Ingo and Hilde will get back to the group regarding to get input on the incoming budget requests.

Hilde and Darren will meet with the Executive Board on June 9th to discuss budget priorities (see agenda point 0 above).