Introduction

Partner organizations (i.e., classifications’ custodians) can find in Caliper a platform to edit and publish classifications they maintain, either individually or as shared resource. In the following of this section, we hint at the mechanisms needed to ensure smooth collaboration among partners, and effective maintenance of the platform. First, we define three bodies and their functions (Section “Governing Bodies”), then we outline a typical data flow for the inclusion of new content into Caliper (Section “Governance”).

As a joint effort, Caliper will be led by a distributed team formed by representatives of the partner institutions and organized around “bodies” with specific roles. We identify:

• a Steering Committee giving high level directions for the development of Caliper;
• a Quality Board ensuring the appropriate quality standard for all content of Caliper (in particular, that all classifications included in Caliper faithfully reproduce the content published in the corresponding official standards);
• a Technical Committee taking care of all operations needed to add classifications in Caliper, as well as the operations related to the maintenance of the Caliper infrastructure.

The box below describes a simple, yet typical interaction among the three bodies. The example described covers the case of inclusion of an existing classification in Caliper. 

Table 1. A typical model of interaction between the Steering Committee, the Technical Committee and the Quality Board.

The figure below gives a graphical representation of the scenario described in Table 1, with an emphasis on communication among the bodies. In practice:

• the Steering Committee decides and coordinates with the Technical Committee the work needed to include a new classification
• the Technical Committee consults the Quality Board for requirements and content validation
• the Quality Board is appointed by the Steering Committee (typically, the would be expert from the Custodian Organization represented in the Steering Committee) and reports to it.

How the Partnership operates

Steering Committee (SC)

The Steering Committee (SC) proposes and approves directions for the development of Caliper, both in terms on platform’s functionalities and contents. In particular, the SC agrees on new contents to be added to the platform, appoints editors and, in case of resources jointly maintained, agrees on roles, responsibilities and formal editorial workflows.

The Steering Committee is formed by representatives from the involved organizations. A member of the SC acts as Chairperson, organizing and facilitating meetings of the Committee and guaranteeing an effective flow of information among members of the SC.

Technical Committee (TC)

The Technical Committee (TC) oversees the overall maintenance and development of Caliper. To this end, the TC: 

• takes care of the inclusion of new resources in Caliper (operation that may require various tasks, such as converting formats, checking that appropriateness of the available data models or devising new ones, etc) and supports editors in their daily maintenance work;
• liaises with relevant communities of experts to implement available best practices;
• liaises with the IT teams at BC3 and UNITOV to ensure the smooth functioning of the Caliper platform and that statistical requirements are correctly implemented.
• liaise with members of the Quality Board (see below) and coordinates their activities.

The Technical Committee is formed by a small team of people whose backgrounds cover the areas of information management, semantic web technologies, statistics, system administration and/or software development. The Technical Committee is led by a Technical Lead (TL) in charge of coordinating all activities carried on by the Technical Committee. The TL acts as liaison between the Quality Board (see below) and the Steering Committee to gather requirements originated by the community of editors and bring them up to the Steering Committee. The TL coordinates support to third parties willing to interact with data served by Caliper.

Initially, the TC will be formed by the same Caliper’s team at FAO and the TL will be appointed by FAO and UNSD. Then, the TC is expected to grow thanks to the input and contribution of partners.

Quality Board (QB)

The Quality Board (QB) ensures the appropriate highest quality standard of the content available in Caliper. Given that the members of the QB primarily interact with the content of Caliper (as opposed to its technical infrastructure), we will refer to them as “editors”.

Members of the Quality Board are domain experts and classification experts working in custodian organizations and appointed by their home Organization to ensure that the classifications published in Caliper met the required level of quality. Ideally, each classification in Caliper should have a focal point in the Quality Board. Typical tasks carried out by members of the QB include validating the inclusion of a new classification into Caliper, making sure that changes in the original standard are timely reflected in Caliper, or providing translations of standards as requested by the Steering Committee. Activities of the QB are coordinated by the Technical Lead.  

Editorial workflow

Custodian Organizations may use Caliper as a platform for creating and maintaining classifications. The editing tool, VocBench, allows for the definition of formalized workflows based on the notions of “status” of editable elements (e.g., an item label or code), and that of “roles”:

• Users may play different editorial roles, where roles are defined in terms of the associated editing rights. For example, a Spanish translator will have editing rights only in Spanish, while a classification expert will have editing right on the hierarchical structure of the classification. Note that the same user may play different roles in different projects.
• An editable item may be in different status, such as “draft,” “validated” or “published.”

Custodians may define their own preferred combinations of roles and statuses to define the editorial workflow that best suits them.

Example: Including new resources and editorial flow

Partner organizations may be oriented to add resources to Caliper for different purposes, such as dissemination only or dissemination and editing. Moreover, custodians may want to use Caliper as the editing platform for existing classifications or for classifications created in Caliper itself. A possible combination of these cases is when an existing classification is included for dissemination, and it is used as the basis for a new version (this could be the case of CPC2.1 and a new CPC2.2 or CPC3.0).

If a classification is included for dissemination only, the custodian organization appoints one or more experts to act as editors and member of the Quality Board. While the Technical Committee takes care of the actual inclusion of the classification in Caliper (e.g., applying format conversion, adapting data models etc.), the editors provide the TC with all the domain-specific requirements that should be met by the converted classifications, and validate the output of the conversion process.

When a classification is included for dissemination and editing, the custodian organization appoints one or more editors that, together with the Technical Committee, will define the appropriate data model to be implemented in Caliper and formalize the required editorial workflow to be implemented in the editing platform. Similarly, the Technical Committee and Quality Board will work closely together to define the appropriate arrangements (including data model and editorial workflow) for a new version to be then maintained in Caliper. 

What is common to all cases distinguished above is that each Custodian defines its own namespace (for example, currently FAO’s namespace is “https:stats.fao.org/classifications”, while the UN namespace is “https://unstats.un.org/classifications”). Classifications may be maintained by editors from the same Custodian Organization (as in the case of the many classifications belonging to the International Family of Classifications, under the custody of UN, or the classifications used in the World Agriculture Census, under the custody of FAO). Alternatively, editors from different organizations may collaborate on the same classification (this may be the case of the Central Product Classification, where the main part of the classification could be maintained by UNSD, and the portion relevant to agriculture could be maintained by FAO)