Creating Controlled Vocabularies

As part of the Industry Schema metadata work that I am doing at the moment, we need to create a few organisation- and industry-specific controlled vocabularies. The last time that I did something like this (establish a metadata schema for an organisation), I don’t think that we did a great job of getting the controlled vocabularies sorted out. Obviously, it was pretty easy for the elements that used external ones (like the Integrated Public Service Vocabulary or IPSV) but for the bespoke ones, we just didn’t get our act together.

So, for this one, I am going to get my extremely knowledgeable colleagues to create a starting point at our next team meeting which I will then put in front of the section heads before getting input on it from key people around the rest of the organisation. Once we have the necessary lists sorted out for my department and the organisation as a whole, I will start to get in touch with other organisations in the industry to try to achieve some convergence on this issue.

Creating the lists and identifying the elements (and creating the necessary supporting documentation) isn’t proving to be the difficult thing. It’s getting everyone to agree on a set of terms…