Governance Group minutes 2022-12-09

Friday 09 December 2022, 11:00

Attendees: Petr Knoth (PK), Mick Eadie (ME), Paul Walk (PW), Nicola Dowson (ND), Beverley Jones (BJ), George Macgregor (GM - Chair)

Minutes of last meeting

GM welcomed RGG members. The minutes of last meeting were reviewed and agreed as accurate. PW proposed a slight change to the wording of RRG's intention to publish a blog post reaffirming the importance of aggregators. GM agreed the wording was less than ideal and a change should be made.

Action: GM to update minutes accordingly.

GM reported that he had been in communication with members of the MoreBrains Cooperative regarding their forthcoming advisory work, to be undertaken on behalf of UKRI and in service of the UKRI Open Access Policy technical implementation. GM and PK have been invited to join an expert working group to support the MoreBrains work. The outcome of this programme of work will be technical recommendations, including on the issue of metadata schema adoption. Discussion of Rioxx v3.0 will be relevant in this context.

BJ and PK highlighted the importance of 'adopter groups' in relation to Rioxx and that it was critical to engage potential developers, as well as repository software owners, that the need for Rioxx compliant repository plugins would be necessary.

Action: GM to highlight possible development requirements to relevant communities for practice and repository software owners.

Update to schema documentation for dc:relation

Discussion of this agenda item pertained to actions surrounding updates to the schema documentation for dc:relation. In particular, modifying the documentation to accommodate the use of the accessRightsURI attribute in conjunction with the COAR Access Rights Vocabulary.

GM confirmed that the agreed changes had been implemented in the revised draft schema documentation but noted that its inclusion was subject to further change, depending on the decisions made in the subsequent agenda items.

Semantics audit

An action arising from the previous meeting was to perform a general audit of the schema's semantics. This was necessary owing to changes to schema structure and its semantics between versions 2.0 and 3.0, particularly in the area of related expressions (communicated via dc:relation). These changes have created a tension between what is described at the 'root' and 'file' levels.

RGG members reviewed the outcome of the audit (issue 53), in which potential issues were highlighted for:

Property conflicts between root and file levels;
Better semantics to communicate different expressions within dc:relation;
Consequent proliferation of property attributes for dc:relation and a lack of hierarchical inheritance; and,
Possible internal contradictions regarding the use of schema.org for the type atttribute within dc:relation but the COAR Controlled Vocabulary for Resource Type Genres used for rioxxterms:type at the root level.

PK considered issue 4 to be of minimal concern since a conceptual distinction is being communicated between type at the root and file level. GM acknowledged this but noted that, depending on the granularity with which expressions would be expected to be described, the COAR Type Genres offered superior specificity in defining scholarly types.

PW and PK considered the proliferation of attributes described in issue 3 above to be of minimal concern. BJ noted the lack of hierarchy as impeding the expressiveness of the schema but reported that early impressions of v3.0 within her community of practice were positive.

RGG members engaged in general discussion of the issues noted.

PW reiterated the semantic tensions that have been introduced between v2.0 and v3.0 and proposed that the semantics be documented more formally. This was considered necessary for the RGG to finally resolve the recurring schema tensions. GM agreed that the updates to Rioxx were performed without the aid of a data model and that the creation of one would be beneficial. PW recommended that Rioxx should seek to model what is necessary and no more, with a particular focus on communicating where harvestable file content is located. RGG members agreed.

BJ reported possible issues arising from the UKRI OA Policy requirement for accepted author manuscripts (AAM) to be assigned PIDs, noting that ambiguity had emerged about whether the assigned PID should resolve to the item's repository 'splash page' or the file itself.

Action: GM to document / model Rioxx v3.0 release candidate and circulate for RGG reflection.
Action: RGG to use resulting model to resolve metadata modelling conflicts within the current verison of the schema at the next RGG meeting, with a view to finalising the release candidate for Q1 in 2023.
Action: GM to liaise with Adam Vials Moore regarding AAM PID expectations under the UKRI OA Policy.

Modelling multiple URIs

Discussion of this agenda item related to issue 44. Following the decisions and actions arising from the previous meeting, GM reported that there had been further discussion on the Rioxx GitHub repositoriy of modelling multiple URIs for authors and other entities. GM noted that further consideration of a possible solution may be necessary.

RGG agreed that discussion of this issue would depend on considerations arising from the metadata modelling exercise but would be considered early in 2023.

Blog post

GM thanked RGG members for their feedback on a draft blog post, circulated prior to the meeting. The blog post fulfilled an action arising from the previous meeting.

Minor amendments were suggested by meeting members and GM agreed to implement them imminently, with a view to publishing the blog post w/b 12 December 2022.

AOB

No other business was raised.

DONM

To be confirmed but agreed by members that it should be soon (ideally late January / early February 2023).

GM 21/12/2022