SATRE Collaboration Café 4th July: Glossaries and terminology

Introduction

SATRE’s 7th Collaboration Cafe was held on the 4th July 2023. To register your interest for future Collaboration Cafes, please fill in the form.

SATRE (Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments) is one of 5 ‘driver projects’ funded by DARE UK as part of their Phase 1b funding call.

All projects (TRE-FX, TELEPORT, SARA, SACRO and SATRE) are working on different aspects of digital infrastructure provision for working with sensitive data securely. The vision is for each project to create research outputs that can be picked up and used by TRE teams across the country.

It’s crucial the driver projects have a shared understanding of core terms and concepts within the TRE space — after all, if we understand the same terms differently, we are likely to use different approaches within our projects and end up with disjointed outputs.

Even more importantly, a shared understanding of core terms and concepts is crucial to move towards the broader national vision of a standardised approach to TRE provision, and to be able to clearly engage with all interested and impacted members of the community — including members of the public whose data may be held within TREs.

Because of this, the DARE projects have banded together to create a shared project glossary. Within this glossary we are collaboratively defining key terms across projects, which can be used to:

• Articulate how we are understanding terms across the DARE ecosystem
• Provide definitions for key terms within the TRE space that can be understood by everybody
• Iterate our shared understanding of thorny concepts, through an open, version-controlled document anyone can contribute to

In SATRE’s Collaboration Café on 4th July, we brought the community together to work on the first version of this glossary.

Setup

For the purposes of the Café, we split up the glossary into broad categories of terms, which were:

• Core terms: Fundamental and common terms within the TRE and research space
• Security terms: Terms to do with security practice around TREs
• Technical terms: Terms referring to specific technical components, processes, concepts and more
• Information governance: Terms relating to the management of information risk
• Data and data management: Terms related to anything around the safe management of data specifically
• Roles: Different roles common within the TRE space
• Products/services/organisations: Groups that offer products/services used within the TRE space, and teams and organisations working within the space

Breakout rooms were created for each category above, and rooms were tasked with

• Reviewing terms that already have definitions
• Adding definitions for terms that don’t have them yet
• Adding additional terms we become aware are needed through discussion

Discussion Summary

The majority of thought from the breakout rooms was captured in edits and comments on the shared glossary. Nevertheless, there were some broader themes that emerged from breakout room discussions and the final wrap up, including:

Accessibility of the glossary

It was raised that these terms should be as accessible as possible for everyone involved in, or impacted by, TREs. This includes members of the public who may not have any previous technical or domain-specific knowledge.

Making a fully accessible glossary is tricky. Whilst all fundamental terms should be universally understandable, some more technical terms may require an underlying knowledge of certain technical concepts.

In this situation, it should be made explicit what background knowledge is required, and where those reading the glossary can find and gain this knowledge themselves.

Another option is to provide two definitions for these terms — one that is high-level and universally understandable, and one that goes into more detail but may require specific knowledge/skills to understand. In this way everybody can be brought along at the level of detail that works for them.

Linking definitions together

We also discussed the importance of taking a step back to ensure the glossary is consistent, well-linked, comprehensive and aligned with other work that has already been done exploring these terms elsewhere. Where accepted definitions already exist, we should link out to them.

We should also ensure the way we talk about related concepts in the glossary (for instance, ‘Desktop’ and ‘Virtual Desktop’) are described in similar ways and make reference to each other. This will make it easier to holistically understand concepts, and how they all link together.

Formalising the glossary

A final thought discussed in the Café was formalising the glossary beyond the currently very fragile shared document. As a starting point, it was agreed an open GitHub repository should be created to store the current version of the glossary, and this should support a documentation site (for instance, ReadTheDocs) that allows easy exploration of the latest version of the glossary.

Next Steps

Following the Collaboration Café, and feedback from the community, we are taking the follow steps as a project team:

Create an open repo

We are finalising where this will live initially (for instance, in the SATRE, UK-TRE community orgs or somewhere else), and may be transferred to a more sustainable organisation at the end of the funding window. It will support version control, contributions from the community, and rendering of the glossary as a ReadTheDocs website.

Restructure the glossary

At the moment, the glossary is one long list. We will restructure the glossary to make it more easy to navigate and find terms users are interested in.

Continue engaging the community and public

We will iterate the glossary continuously based on feedback of the community and crucially members of the public, to ensure all relevant terms are defined to an appropriate level of understanding and granularity.

Contribute to this glossary upstream from our projects

As the DARE driver projects further build out there respective outputs, we will ensure any new terms we come across that should be added to the glossary are included in a consistent and predictable manner.

For any questions about the glossary or the SATRE project, please get in contact with us via satre-contact@dundee.ac.uk.

And to register your interest in any future Collaboration Cafes, please fill in this form