Stage 1 of the FHMWG standards process is the drafting of recommendations about the use of existing metadata tags for family history purposes.

FHMWG has a larger mission, but this initial project is limited to the use of existing photo embedded metatdata tags.

The board has identified the following areas for metadata standardisation during the stage-1 work:

• Album
• Caption
• Dates
• Event
• Location
• Objects
• People
• Rights
• Sources

We anticipate having several concurrent teams working on different subsets of these topics.

It is within scope for these to be combined (e.g. source and rights tags may prove to be sufficiently related to be worth merging) or further split up (e.g., sources and provenance may prove to be sufficiently varied to be worth splitting). These shall be considered an initial list, not a final mandate.

Note that the word "subject" is used differently in different contexts. Sometimes it means the broad overviews (e.g., "1980 Jones family reunion"); sometimes a general term for things in the scene (e.g., Objects and People).

Also within scope for the standards teams is

• Specifications, documentation
• Quality, conformance, testing
• Sample Code

1. For each topic
   1. Perform inventory of relevant tags in EXIF, IPTC, and XMP
   2. If needed, draft "how these tags differ" text
   3. Create recommendations on which tags should be used (see, e.g., draft dates)
      1. include which to read and which to write
      2. include how to resolve conflicting information in equivalent-meaning tags
   4. If applicable, draft "avoiding malicious/tracking/marketing payloads" recommendations for free-text fields
   5. If applicable, identify personal information fields that should be removed or edited under a “right to be forgotten” request.
   6. If applicable, draft "we recommend these authorities or formats" for identifier-valued fields (e.g., URI, IRI, UUID, GUID)
   7. Interview potential implementers to collect initial feedback on recommendations; return to earlier steps as needed
   8. Create minimal draft open-source software for implementing recommendation
2. Coordination
   1. Unify formatting and style of recommendations and sample code
   2. Coordinate on cross-cutting ideas where a single decision could serve multiple teams
   3. Create combined recommendation document

We anticipate additional activities after these steps are completed, including seeking consensus, defining compliance certification processes, coordinating with other metadata organizations, etc. Those will be added to this document if/when they are more clearly defined.

Working documents can be stored in google drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1xssT6SYLWrTFtIHOZuBJbrqu7SF4UP2l) and/or on github (https://github.com/fhmwg/). For access to drive, send Gordon Clarke your google account. For access to github, send Luther Tychonievich your github account. One folder shall be created for each working team. At present, we are not imposing any common structure on these folders. Files outside of folders either predate the creation of this structure or are of general interest across all teams.