[Asis-l] NISO Releases Issues in Vocabulary Management Technical Report

[NISO Announce]

Baltimore, MD - September 25, 2017 - The National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) announces the publication of a new Technical Report, NISO
TR-06-2017, *Issues in Vocabulary Management*
<http://www.niso.org/publications/tr/tr-06-2017>. This document is one
outcome of the NISO Bibliographic Roadmap Development Project, which was
conducted in 2013-14 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The
technical report builds upon the work outlined in the 2014 project summary
report *Roadmap for the Future of Bibliographic Exchange
<http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/13325/NISO_14007BibliographicRoadmapDevelopmentDoc_FINAL2.pdf>*
by discussing policies supporting vocabulary use and reuse, documentation
for vocabularies, and requirements for the preservation of RDF
vocabularies.

The audiences for this technical report start with the communities NISO has
brought together: libraries, publishers, and service providers. But beyond
these communities, NISO aims for the document to help the many individuals
and groups building and sharing bibliographic and other descriptive data,
as well as knowledge managers within a variety of organizations using
vocabularies to solve problems.

NISO TR-06-2017, *Issues in Vocabulary Management* is the result of efforts
by three working groups and a steering committee, whose remits illustrate
the breadth of the work involved. The Use/Reuse working group looked at
policy and social considerations, including appropriate licenses and
permissions, maintenance expectations, and versioning. The Documentation
working group explored standards for documentation of vocabulary
properties, particularly as it relates to discovery and usage, as well as
governance and sustainability issues. The Preservation working group
examined the landscape issue of "orphan vocabularies," where organizations
abandon vocabularies for lack of funding or when the vocabularies cannot
make the transition between print and digital.

"NISO is grateful to the many volunteer experts whose work contributed to
this much-needed technical report," comments NISO Executive Director Todd
Carpenter. "In the past, vocabularies were tied to particular collections
and tended to become insular, but today we need descriptive information
that works in the Linked Open Data environment. Enabling interoperability
among systems and organizations is a major goal of NISO's work, and this
technical report moves us forward in that area."

Diane Hillmann, Principal of Metadata Management Associates LLC and
co-chair of the Use and Reuse working group, notes that as well as offering
a way for users of vocabularies to streamline their output, *Issues in
Vocabulary Management* discusses the preservation of those vocabularies.
"We've seen how often orphan vocabularies have arisen over the years," says
Hillmann. "With this technical report, we aim to allow those using or
managing vocabularies to ensure that their work remains viable and
available for years to come."

NISO TR-06-2017, *Issues in Vocabulary Management* and related documents
are available on the NISO website at
http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/BibliographicRoadmap/.

*About NISO*
NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance
of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and
effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in
research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries,
publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support
learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization,
management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting
communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information
standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO
website <http://www.niso.org/>.