On Jun 5, 2009, at 9:20 PM, John R. WIECZOREK wrote:
[...] The first s organization of the standard. The domains help organize the properties in ways that help people to understand their meaning and purpose.
That's a worthwhile goal but isn't that using the wrong means? I.e., specifying the domain is telling something - and in an unambiguous manner - to machines, not humans.
You can of course create user interfaces or renderings that turns the domain specification into something meaningful to humans, too. But you could use any term property for that, couldn't you? I.e., you could use a property that doesn't imply specific and possibly far reaching machine inferences. (I haven't had time to check yet but I suspect that there are - W3C or not - conventions for how to add human- targeted class and property annotations to vocabularies.)
(BTW for comparison purposes, note that DC doesn't assert any domain or range for any of its terms, allowing the broadest possible use.)
[...] The second reason for the domain assignments is that we lack a formal ontology, and this is an attempt to have one to govern at least the terms within this standard.
I'd argue that it's worth distinguishing between a metadata vocabulary and a formal ontology, and that having one product try to be both may limit its ability to fully satisfy both.
A standard metadata vocabulary with the primary purpose that we all call the same thing by the same name is broadly useful and can help enormously with data integration across fields as diverse as genetics, genomics, systematics, ecology, and taxonomy (and more, as we heard in London). A formal ontology that supports inferences over integrated data is also highly useful, but not necessarily at the same breadth.
What is the potentially problematic future case of asserting that a specimen is an dwcterms:Occurrence? It is one.
My example was indeed a weak one, as we are indeed referencing specimens. For example, I couldn't use dwcterms:collectionCode to assert a code for a museum collection, because it would imply that the collection is an dwcterms:Occurrence.
Maybe you don't want people to use DwCTerms for anything else other than describing specimen records, but I'd argue that without such limitations the standard could become much more broadly useful.
As a comparison, dc:creator and dc:title are meanwhile being used in vastly more contexts than the original authors of DC had probably imagined. I'm not sure this would have also happened if applying dc:title implied specific assertions about the nature of what it is being applied to.
Just my $0.02.
-hilmar