Publishing is the act of making data and information resources accessible to others. For effective and accurate scholarly communication developing shared vocabularies, terminologies and semantic assets are critical to the discovery and understanding of published resources, and help reduce ambiguity and increase interoperability. Many disciplines and organisations have local lists of vocabularies that serve multiple functions including enhancing discovery, annotation and description. With the globalisation of data and information resources, enabling a common understanding of any ‘concept’ used to describe or define a ‘thing’ in our world is becoming critical. There is a growing need to develop common vocabularies that can be used across broader communities and support harmonization of information both within and across disciplines and languages. But we also need to be able to communicate to users of any semantic asset, information about its sustainability, governance, authority, conditions of use, etc.
