/ld4-community-recon

LD4 Community Working Group on Reconciliation - ARCHIVED

LD4 Community Working Group on Reconciliation

About

Linked Data for Libraries, Linked Data for Production, and Linked Data for Libraries Labs are a series of grant-funded projects working broadly on implementing Linked Data in library workflows across functional areas and domains. The umbrella effort is referred to as 'LD4'.

LD4 Community groups are a way to work with interested community members on a work area or topic that intersects with Linked Data and library work needs. They are open to participation from anyone and aim for the highest level of transparency in efforts, work, & outputs to help support a growing community of Linked Data implementers in libraries and other GLAM, cultural heritage, and memory institutions.

Conveners:

Scope

This LD4 Community group is an effort to:

  • generate a shared understanding of what reconciliation & resolution work entails, including use cases and user stories;
  • build collaboration for existing or emerging reconciliation & resolution tool development;
  • and outline pragmatic solutions including matching algorithms, workflows, tools, and functional requirements for Cultural Heritage/GLAM+ resource metadata reconciliation & resolution.

The above is generated from LD4 Community Meeting Feedback, which included the following points:

  • “There were so many cool presentations and conversations today around reconciliation tools, I would love to see conversations around that continue”
  • “I have a lot of work queued up around reconciliation. lets work together? most is queued up in GH”
  • “We’ve been trying to compare reconciliation tools and would like to expand this with this group’s input”
  • Largest gap in tooling from the Tools breakout: Reconciliation listed

Nota Bene: Metadata here is used in an expansive way to cover not only traditional bibliographic metadata, but also descriptions for emerging resource types & metadata domains (rights, administrative, structural, etc.) as applicable to the group’s efforts.

Nota Bene: Reconciliation has been used to mean a number of things in our domain and community work. At this point, we are primarily thinking about these two topics:

  • Reconciliation (in specific sense, and what we mean): entity/URI to entity/URI
  • Entity resolution: string to entity/URI (often misnamed reconciliation)

The community working group may extend scope later on to include other work areas often related to or mixed in with reconciliation and resolution, such as:

  • Lexicalization: entity/URI to string (i.e. getting a label, currently out of scope for this group)

Participants

The group is open to anyone who wants to contribute. Get in touch the conveners if you're uncertain where to start or how to jump in.

Working Areas

See our Working Plan for our current work areas, timeline, and outputs in progress.

General Timeframe

For group outputs: Focus on smaller deliverables with shorter timeframes (< 3 months), as well as parallel work to cover a few different areas of work at the same time. We will start planning these at the kick-off meeting.

For larger group planning: Plan on an assessment at 1 year (or earlier if things seem to not be working). The 1 year mark is a time to rotate conveners, choose new meeting times, refresh the goals, disband, morph, etc.

Workspace & Communication Channels

Primary Workspace (Notes, Outputs):

Communication:

Expectations of Participants

In order to create an inclusive, safe, and open work environment, we ask that all participants follow a set of rules designed by the the Recurse Center, previously the Hacker School. In their own words, 'the goal [of the Recurse Center Social Rules] isn't to burden everyone with a bunch of annoying rules, or to give us a stick to bludgeon people with for "being bad." Rather, these rules are designed to help all of us build a pleasant, productive, and fearless community.'

As such, these four rules are a lightweight set of explicit social norms to curtail specific kinds of behavior found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning/working environment. The four rules are listed here; you can read more about them at http://recurse.com/manual#sub-sec-social-rules.

  1. "No feigning surprise." You shouldn't act surprised when someone says they don't know something. There is no benefit to feigning surprise, and regardless of intent, it makes someone feel bad, or worse, about admitting that they don't know something.
  2. "No well-actually's." This is when someone says something almost, but not entirely correct, and another person responds with "well, actually," and gives a correction. That's not to say we don't care about truth or precision, but there are better ways to communicate this.
  3. "No back-seat driving." If you overhear other people working through a problem, don't just intermittently toss advice in without engaging.
  4. "No subtle -isms". This last rule bans racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other kinds of bias. Subtle -isms are small things that make others feel uncomfortable, and might be familiar as they're under the term "microagressions."

Tip of the hat here also to Mark Matienzo, who wrote the additional text explaining each of these rules in the context of a collaborative environment. We've paraphrased Matienzo's comments here.

Questions or Comments?

Use Github Issues on this repository or get in touch with one of the conveners.