COAR Controlled Vocabularies Workshop took place on 8 May 2017 at COAR 2017 Annual Meeting. Around 40+ participants joined in the half day open session. The session was organized to introduce COAR vocabularies to the members including what has been done so far, a discussion environment for the existing vocabularies, and next agenda items of the Controlled Vocabularies Interest Group for the coming year. Large part of the discussions was focused on the challenges with the vocabularies in implementing them into repositories and expanding their adoption more widely.

The Access Mode Vocabulary has been released just before the COAR Annual Meeting and the Working Group will seek feedback from the global community shortly. The workshop offered an introduction to the Access Mode Vocabulary, as well as having discussions around the next version 2.0 of the Resource Type Vocabulary and pending issues to be undertaken by the Editorial Board. One of the next items on the agenda is the Version Type Vocabulary and it is planned to be finalised after the summer of 2017. A vocabulary on Resource Date Types will follow suit.  

The use cases presented on the implementation of the Resource Type Vocabulary in the DSpace repository of University of Minho and in the Phaidra Classification Server of University of Vienna will light the way for many other repositories. Implementations of COAR Vocabularies at national and international level in the case of RCAAP in Portugal, JPCOAR Consortium in Japan and LA Referencia in Latin America proved the need for and the benefit of COAR vocabularies. However, they also reflected challenging points in geographical diversity such as language, hierarchical structure in concepts etc. Using COAR vocabularies will be recommended in OpenAIRE Literature Repository Guidelines and CRIS-CERIF Guidelines which will be released shortly. Next possible recommendation of use is expected from LA Referencia using OpenAIRE Guidelines.

The presentations from the workshop can be found below: