Joel -- From an insider-outsider perspective, a couple quick comments:

1) Do you mean Darwin Core is frequently misunderstood by standards developers? Or do you mean Darwin Core is frequently misunderstood by people without specialized skills to read and understand standards?

2) I see the point that some clean-up would be useful but my view is that Darwin Core fulfills its intended purpose for most people who want to map their headers in a spreadsheet to a set of terms in the Core. This support an ecosystem of data that has come available online over the last 15 years. I was talking to Tim Robertson, and I think the number is 3 records per second (per average) coming online via GBIF, the vast majority in Darwin Core format.

3) Is it enough to clean up Darwin Core somehow, wipe our hands and walk away? I guess maybe we could be sharper with term definitions. But is that the problem or is the problem that what we want to do with Darwin Core doesn't fit its history and intended use as an exchange format.

4) I see the bigger challenge being how we grow more semantically meaningful representations that let us do new things (an example might be the Biocollections Ontology (BCO)) versus more limited things we do with Darwin Core.

This is just my naive impression. I am not an expert in RDF or the semantic web. Id like yet more clarity before we get into what might be an challenging task. Could we be even more focused? Can we surgically repair the key things in DwC not do a "clean up"?

Best, Rob

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 1:45 PM, joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu> wrote:

Hi Everyone,

Darwin Core remains poorly documented, occasionally inconsistent, and
frequently misunderstood. (Does anyone disagree with that
characterization?) I believe this is one of the reasons we're seeing a
proliferation of overlapping and sometimes incompatible ontologies
building on Darwin Core terms.

One of the suggestions that came up on the TDWG-RDF mailing list is to
have a clean-up-a-thon/document-a-thon for TDWG namespaces and terms. I
suggest that, until such a clean up of Darwin Core occurs, TDWG accept no
additions to the Darwin Core standard. There are several examples in
support of my claim that we're building on a shaky foundation - an obvious
one is that, as Steve is currently pointing out, there is no consensus on
what constitutes a Darwin Core occurrence. (Can anyone name an instance of
the class "http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Occurrence"?)

The clean-up-a-thon proposal was enthusiastically endorsed within the RDF
group, but no one volunteered to organize it. I propose that we
self-organize, and find a way to carve out two days at the coming meeting
to hash out as much as we can, with a follow-on workshop if necessary. But
first, I'd be interested to know - am I the only one who feels this way?

Sincerely,
Joel.

p.s.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating - Darwin Core is almost an
excellent standard, and almost ideally suited to be the foundation for a
semantic web for biodiversity informatics. I have great respect for those
who were involved in its creation and continued curation - for their hard
work, and clear thinking, and patience for people like me struggling to
understand. But all that work, thought, and patience will be for naught,
if the gyre is allowed to widen much further.

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