Kneebone L1
1Kurrawongai, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Les has worked across government, research and social service sectors developing linked data vocabularies, including the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT), Public Policy Taxonomy, Biosecurity Thesaurus and National Skills Taxonomy. Les has also built grey literature databases for government- and industry-led research, including the Analysis & Policy Observatory (APO) and Biosecurity Portal.
At KurrawongAI, Les provides expert advice to clients on using and creating vocabularies. He also manages reference data for the Indigenous Data Network and Biodiversity Data Repository projects. Les leads vocabulary training efforts, ensuring clients understand how to get the most out of the tools and resources we offer.
Abstract:
Local Contexts (localcontexts.org) is a global initiative that provides Indigenous communities with tools to reassert cultural authority over heritage collections and data. Local Contexts supports communities to influence how data is collected, described, accessed, shared and reused.
We present the Indigenous Data Network's implementation of Local Contexts 'Labels' and 'Notices' which has been made to implement Local Contexts information within traditional cataloguing metadata models. Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels communicate provenance, community authority, cultural protocols and permissions for access, use and circulation. Notices enable institutions to disclose interests, signal responsibilities, and support engagement with Indigenous communities. To enable scalable implementation, Labels and Notices were modelled as Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) vocabularies, extended through selected properties from the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) ontology and some local ontology development. The vocabularies (data.idnau.org/pid/vocabs) can be associated with metadata for creative works, collections and datasets, allowing governance information to travel with digital objects across systems.
This modelling work presented several challenges. Label and Notice text may be reused verbatim or contextually adapted by collection managers. To address this, template statements were supplemented with examples and RDF customisation patterns. Additional complexity arose in mapping statements to permissions, prohibitions, duties and obligations using ODRL and related vocabularies.
The resulting vocabularies and lightweight ontology demonstrate how Indigenous governance requirements can be operationalised using open standards familiar to libraries, archives and research data services. As adoption grows, the model is expected to evolve in response to new contexts, community needs and emerging use cases.
