Joel,
Within the last year I did confirm with John Wieczorek that the dwctermshistory.rdf is THE one normative document of Darwin Core. One would have no way to know that other than personally asking John since I have never found anything in writing which states that. The connection between dwctermshistory.rdf and the RDF served when the terms are dereferenced is a bit tenuous, but if you drill down into the term definitions that get served via the dwcterms.rdf document, they are linked to the historical terms via dcterms:hasVersion and dcterms:replaces properties although I'm not sure I can explain how a semantic client would follow its nose to the dwctermshistory.rdf document. I don't know what went into the decision to set DwC up this way since it was before my time. John W. may have further comments.
In a previous email which I'm not going to attempt to look up in the archives, I asked (begged?) that the Darwin Core RDF documents be clearly marked as to whether they were normative or not because I've been confused about this exact thing for several years. I was thinking that the recommendations of the VoMaG draft report on vocabulary management included clearly demarcating which document is normative in a standard, but I just looked at the report again (http://community.gbif.org/pg/file/read/34059/ ) and didn't see it. The section 4.3 Recommendation 5 says "As part of its documentation, a vocabulary must include machine readable metadata expressed, e.g., in RDF, that describe the main characteristics of the vocabulary." Perhaps this recommendation should be amended to say that one particular characteristic to be described is the identity of the type 1 (normative) document for the vocabulary if it is a standard. Since the VoMaG report is in the middle of its public comment period, this would be an excellent comment to make. I'm not going to make it since I'm one of the authors, but anybody else could.
Steve
joel sachs wrote:
On Mon, 1 Jul 2013, Steve Baskauf wrote:
<snip>
To illustrate this with Darwin Core, the single normative (Type 1) RDF document is http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/source/browse/trunk/rdf/dwctermshistory....
</snip>
Steve,
Are you sure that that document is *the* normative Darwin Core? Consider:
i. It is not included in the Download from the Darwin Core Cover Page, http://www.tdwg.org/standards/450/ (I admit that this is weak evidence, since every document that is included in the download is outdated. So whatever the normative standard is, it's not included in the Download from the Darwin Core Cover Page - strange but true.)
ii. It does not define any Darwin Core terms. For example, the document defines http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/PreservedSpecimen-2008-11-19 and http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/PreservedSpecimen-2011-10-16 but not http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/PreservedSpecimen
I always assumed that the normative standard was defined by http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwcterms.rdf and http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctype.rdf, and (perhaps) http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ and http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/dwctype/
Could someone please clarify?
Many thanks, Joel.