Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the *RDF document of current terms* be made to represent the *normative standard for Darwin Core* rather than *Complete History normative document* we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
1) the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
2) information currently held in http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
3) all documents other than the proposed normative document would not be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
I fully support this. It's been long overdue. -hilmar
On 1/20/15, 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the *RDF document of current terms* be made to represent the *normative standard for Darwin Core* rather than *Complete History normative document* we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held
in http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
John,
Although I see merits to parts of this proposal (particularly making some document other than dwctermshistory.rdf as the normative document), I think it may be premature to propose such a large body of changes. In particular, proposing to make an RDF document the only part of the standard is at odds with the approach taken by Audubon Core, where the normative document is human-readable, and there is (currently) no RDF version of the vocabulary. I have heard the opinion expressed by the Audubon Core authors that an RDF document should NOT be the normative document of a standard. So I'm pretty sure that there won't be an immediate consensus on apply that idea TDWG-wide.
Fixing the stalled TDWG Standards Documentation Specification [1] and adopting a TDWG-wide policy for maintaining vocabulary standards has been a longstanding problem, as noted in the Vocabulary Management Task Group report [2]. At the end of October, I was asked by the Executive to work on chartering a Vocabulary Maintenance Specification task group that would be charged with addressing these issues, including dealing with the stalled Standards Documentation Specification and a TDWG-wide alternative to the Darwin Core namespace policy [3]. I agreed to take on the job, but told the Executive that I would be too busy to start on it until after December. It would be great to have you, Peter, and Markus serving as core members of the task group if you are willing, along with others who have experience with standards documentation and maintenance.
Steve
[1] http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/ [2] http://www.gbif.org/resources/2246 [3] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/
John Wieczorek wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the *RDF document of current terms* be made to represent the *normative standard for Darwin Core* rather than *Complete History normative document* we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held
in http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
John et al.,
I like the idea of the standard residing in a single document. It is important, though, that deprecated terms continue to resolve, ideally returning the definition, a "Deprecated" flag, and a helpful message like "Use dwc:xyz instead" or "See http://tdwg.org/abc for discussion".
In general, a distinction is drawn between deprecated and obsolete [1], with deprecated meaning "using this term is discouraged, but it won't cause an error". Specific to Darwin Core, I'm thinking about all the spreasheet data with an "IndividualID" column. Imagine a tool that provides a terminology lookup service when column headers are moused over. I think a good thing to display for "IndividualID" would be something like: --- An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms represented in the Occurrence. Meant to accommodate resampling of the same individual or group for monitoring purposes. May be a global unique identifier or an identifier specific to a data set.
DEPRECATED.
Use OrganismID instead. ---
Of course, having deprecated terms in a file separate from the recommended terms *can* accommodate resolution of the deprecated terms, via redirect rules, etc. I'm just making the point that "what do you see when you dereference a term?" is as important a question as "what documents constitute the standard?"
Joel.
1. See, e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9208091/the-difference-between-deprecated... As noted elsewhere - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11784301/obsolete-vs-deprecated-html - this distinction is spelled out in the Conformance section of HTML 4 - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/conform.html#h-4.1 - but is dropped from HTML 5 in favour of other terminology.
On Tue, 20 Jan 2015, John Wieczorek wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the *RDF document of current terms* be made to represent the *normative standard for Darwin Core* rather than *Complete History normative document* we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not be
part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
I agree that this would greatly simplify John's work managing the Darwin Core term change process. And I agree with Joel about deprecation. Reversing course on something already in common use can cause headaches.
But, I wonder if we should also organize TDWG Standards into two kinds: "Term-Based" and (for lack of a better word) "Non-Term-Based." The proposed "Namespace Policy" could be generalized to apply to all "Term-Based" standards, like Audubon Core. But, for standards like SDD or ABCD that combine terms and structure, I think an additional process is needed. At the moment, the TDWG standards process only enables complete replacement of standards, rather than changes.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of joel sachs Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 11:26 AM To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al.,
I like the idea of the standard residing in a single document. It is important, though, that deprecated terms continue to resolve, ideally returning the definition, a "Deprecated" flag, and a helpful message like "Use dwc:xyz instead" or "See http://tdwg.org/abc for discussion".
In general, a distinction is drawn between deprecated and obsolete [1], with deprecated meaning "using this term is discouraged, but it won't cause an error". Specific to Darwin Core, I'm thinking about all the spreasheet data with an "IndividualID" column. Imagine a tool that provides a terminology lookup service when column headers are moused over. I think a good thing to display for "IndividualID" would be something like: --- An identifier for an individual or named group of individual organisms represented in the Occurrence. Meant to accommodate resampling of the same individual or group for monitoring purposes. May be a global unique identifier or an identifier specific to a data set.
DEPRECATED.
Use OrganismID instead. ---
Of course, having deprecated terms in a file separate from the recommended terms *can* accommodate resolution of the deprecated terms, via redirect rules, etc. I'm just making the point that "what do you see when you dereference a term?" is as important a question as "what documents constitute the standard?"
Joel.
1. See, e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9208091/the-difference-between-deprecated... As noted elsewhere - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11784301/obsolete-vs-deprecated-html - this distinction is spelled out in the Conformance section of HTML 4 - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/conform.html#h-4.1 - but is dropped from HTML 5 in favour of other terminology.
On Tue, 20 Jan 2015, John Wieczorek wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the *RDF document of current terms* be made to represent the *normative standard for Darwin Core* rather than *Complete History normative document* we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
I am in favour of this. Having a single normative document in RDF (which could include terms with a “deprecated status”) should greatly ease the management of DwC.
Éamonn
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of John Wieczorek Sent: 20 January 2015 16:19 To: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
1) the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
2) information currently held in http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
3) all documents other than the proposed normative document would not be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
I am also in favour of this as I like simplicity :-) I also think the distinction of deprecated and obsolete is important and these distinctions must be easily recognizable by users. I do feel that Chuck's point about our two potentially different kinds of standards is valid and I would challenge Steve to address this in his Vocabulary Maintenance Spec.
Also, thanks to John, Markus and Peter for making progress on the transition! This should also make things a little easier for users...
Best, JAmes
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 3:03 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote:
I am in favour of this. Having a single normative document in RDF (which could include terms with a “deprecated status”) should greatly ease the management of DwC.
Éamonn
*From:* tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] *On Behalf Of *John Wieczorek *Sent:* 20 January 2015 16:19 *To:* TDWG Content Mailing List *Subject:* [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the *RDF document of current terms* be made to represent the *normative standard for Darwin Core* rather than *Complete History normative document* we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not be
part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single document
at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not be
part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts: 1. should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF document? 2. should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF? 3. should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process? 4. should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] <eotuama@gbif.org mailto:eotuama@gbif.org> wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek <tuco@berkeley.edu mailto:tuco@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.filteredpush.org/ http://wiki.datakurator.net http://wiki.datakurator.net/ http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
With respect to item 1:
I would support changing to a different RDF document from http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf to something else. When a semantic client dereferences a DwC term and requests content-type: application/rdf+xml, it is not served the normative document. It gets a different one (dwcterms.rdf ?). At least this is what happened in the past when I tested this. It has never been clear to me how a client is supposed to "follow its nose" to find the normative definitions. The normative document is further complicated by having URIs with appended dates which I suppose are connected to the non-dated versions in some way - again, I'm not clear how.
It seems more straightforward to me for the normative document to contain the URIs and metadata for the most recent (undated) versions of all terms, whether they be recommended or deprecated. If a term is deprecated, it shouldn't "disappear from sight". Rather, its metadata should indicate that it's deprecated using the standard property:
<owl:deprecated rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true</owl:deprecated>
I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated. Whether we want humans to see them on a quick reference guide is another story.
Please note that I'm not taking a position on items 2 or 3. Item one simply maintains the status quo (normative document=RDF) and just substitutes one particular document with another.
Steve
Steve Baskauf wrote:
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts:
- should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF
document? 2. should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF? 3. should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process? 4. should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] <eotuama@gbif.org mailto:eotuama@gbif.org> wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek <tuco@berkeley.edu mailto:tuco@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.filteredpush.org/ http://wiki.datakurator.net http://wiki.datakurator.net/ http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it. http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu http://vanderbilt.edu/trees
On Wed, 21 Jan 2015 14:03:44 -0600 Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated.
The usual sense I take from these is that deprecated means some feature will still work, but that it is planned that support for it will be removed for it in a future release, things will work if you use it now, but you should be removing it from any production systems as it will stop working in the future. On the other hand obsolete means that support for it has allready been removed, and use of the feature is expected to cause failures in up to date production systems. Typical sense is in an API, where some function can be annotated as deprecated in one release and then removed from the API in some subsequent release.
In open world systems, the terms do indeed not go away, however, an application that consumes or generates documents using an RDF vocabulary can break as terms are obsoleted and removed from that vocabulary, and annotating terms as deprecated signals developers of generating and consuming applications of places where they will need to make preparations for future changes.
I would expect a deprecated term to exist in a current version of a vocabulary (with an annotation marking it as such), I would only expect an obsolete term to exist in historical versions of the vocabulary and in a history document, not in the current vocabulary.
For RDF in the wild, it's open world, and a prudent developer would expect obsolte terms to exist in RDF documents.
-Paul
Hi Steve,
you are right the current live RDF files are awkward, especially that the “normative” dwctermshistory.rdf document does not contain the real dwc term URIs! It only contains versioned URIs with an appended date. As you said the real terms are covered currently by dwcterms.rdf which is not normative :(
In those rdf documents dwc currently defines a couple of dwc specific properties, for example to indicate the status of a term: dwcattributes:statusrecommended</dwcattributes:status>
In our cleanup branch [1] of dwc that we worked on we decided it would be better to make the current terms the normative document [2] Any advice on how to better model the RDF so it is usable for ontologies is highly appreciated. We basically followed the existing approach which did not use OWL. I vaguely remember during the TDWG ontology discussions that it was preferred then to just stick with RDF schema to allow maximu reuse?
Markus
[1] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/tree/dwc_cleanup [2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On 21 Jan 2015, at 21:03, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
With respect to item 1:
I would support changing to a different RDF document from http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf to something else. When a semantic client dereferences a DwC term and requests content-type: application/rdf+xml, it is not served the normative document. It gets a different one (dwcterms.rdf ?). At least this is what happened in the past when I tested this. It has never been clear to me how a client is supposed to "follow its nose" to find the normative definitions. The normative document is further complicated by having URIs with appended dates which I suppose are connected to the non-dated versions in some way - again, I'm not clear how.
It seems more straightforward to me for the normative document to contain the URIs and metadata for the most recent (undated) versions of all terms, whether they be recommended or deprecated. If a term is deprecated, it shouldn't "disappear from sight". Rather, its metadata should indicate that it's deprecated using the standard property:
<owl:deprecated rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true</owl:deprecated> I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated. Whether we want humans to see them on a quick reference guide is another story.
Please note that I'm not taking a position on items 2 or 3. Item one simply maintains the status quo (normative document=RDF) and just substitutes one particular document with another.
Steve
Steve Baskauf wrote:
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts:
- should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF document?
- should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF?
- should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process?
- should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
- the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single
document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
- information currently held in
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
- all documents other than the proposed normative document would not
be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
If dwc_normative.rdf is to be normative, will there be any specification for how to determine whether data coded to it is conformant? For example, there are some terms which, at first glance, deserve to have a cardinality restriction. Consider e.g. minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters and suppose I code DwC data against [2]. Suppose a Location <L> in my data has two triples
<L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "1.0"^^xsd:real ; <L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "2.0"^^xsd:real ;
Will there be a way that a machine can determine that such data is not conformant to dwc_normative.rdf? Or is it meant to be conformant? Or is the expectation that there is no machine-applicable specification of conformance? (In this case it's particularly hard for me to understand the utility of normative RDFS.)
Bob
[2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:44 PM, Markus Döring mdoering@gbif.org wrote:
Hi Steve,
you are right the current live RDF files are awkward, especially that the “normative” dwctermshistory.rdf document does not contain the real dwc term URIs! It only contains versioned URIs with an appended date. As you said the real terms are covered currently by dwcterms.rdf which is not normative :(
In those rdf documents dwc currently defines a couple of dwc specific properties, for example to indicate the status of a term: dwcattributes:statusrecommended</dwcattributes:status>
In our cleanup branch [1] of dwc that we worked on we decided it would be better to make the current terms the normative document [2] Any advice on how to better model the RDF so it is usable for ontologies is highly appreciated. We basically followed the existing approach which did not use OWL. I vaguely remember during the TDWG ontology discussions that it was preferred then to just stick with RDF schema to allow maximu reuse?
Markus
[1] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/tree/dwc_cleanup [2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On 21 Jan 2015, at 21:03, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
With respect to item 1:
I would support changing to a different RDF document from http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf to something else. When a semantic client dereferences a DwC term and requests content-type: application/rdf+xml, it is not served the normative document. It gets a different one (dwcterms.rdf ?). At least this is what happened in the past when I tested this. It has never been clear to me how a client is supposed to "follow its nose" to find the normative definitions. The normative document is further complicated by having URIs with appended dates which I suppose are connected to the non-dated versions in some way - again, I'm not clear how.
It seems more straightforward to me for the normative document to contain the URIs and metadata for the most recent (undated) versions of all terms, whether they be recommended or deprecated. If a term is deprecated, it shouldn't "disappear from sight". Rather, its metadata should indicate that it's deprecated using the standard property:
<owl:deprecated rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true</owl:deprecated> I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated. Whether we want humans to see them on a quick reference guide is another story.
Please note that I'm not taking a position on items 2 or 3. Item one simply maintains the status quo (normative document=RDF) and just substitutes one particular document with another.
Steve
Steve Baskauf wrote:
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts:
- should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF document?
- should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF?
- should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process?
- should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote: > Dear all, > > Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition > of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've > taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to > the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the > human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of > current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities > to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal. > > We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be > made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than > Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to > make that new normative document the only document in the standard. > > Under this proposal: > > 1) the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single > document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active). > > > 2) information currently held in > http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative > document) and the corresponding Complete History web page > (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained > only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not > currently active). > > > 3) all documents other than the proposed normative document would not > be part of the standard. > > > The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing > rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal > must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent > consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where > consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition. > > > The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important > is that the rules governing changes to the standard > (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be > a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of > these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. > It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If > so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard > until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which > point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core. > > > Other comments about the proposed changes: > > > Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid > confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the > normative document. > > > Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, > superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin > Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions > of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that? > > > Having no document other than the normative one as part of the > standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core > documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive > Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open > to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands. > > > We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have. > > > Please share your comments! > > > Cheers, > > > John > > > _______________________________________________ > tdwg-content mailing list > tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org > http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content >
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Hi all,
I don’t think there has ever been any intention for DwC to impose that kind of restriction, regardless of the format chosen for the authoritative version (e.g. be it wiki text, RDF, HTML or PDF). I’d expect a schema to define that restriction (xsd, class definition etc).
Is that how others see it? I believe this is what John meant when he wrote the spec [1]:
"There is meant to be a clear separation between the terms defined in this standard and the applications that make use of them. For example, though the data types and constraints are not provided in the term definitions, recommendations are made about how to restrict the values where appropriate."
Cheers, Tim
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm
On 22 Jan 2015, at 06:29, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
If dwc_normative.rdf is to be normative, will there be any specification for how to determine whether data coded to it is conformant? For example, there are some terms which, at first glance, deserve to have a cardinality restriction. Consider e.g. minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters and suppose I code DwC data against [2]. Suppose a Location <L> in my data has two triples
<L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "1.0"^^xsd:real ; <L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "2.0"^^xsd:real ;
Will there be a way that a machine can determine that such data is not conformant to dwc_normative.rdf? Or is it meant to be conformant? Or is the expectation that there is no machine-applicable specification of conformance? (In this case it's particularly hard for me to understand the utility of normative RDFS.)
Bob
[2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:44 PM, Markus Döring mdoering@gbif.org wrote:
Hi Steve,
you are right the current live RDF files are awkward, especially that the “normative” dwctermshistory.rdf document does not contain the real dwc term URIs! It only contains versioned URIs with an appended date. As you said the real terms are covered currently by dwcterms.rdf which is not normative :(
In those rdf documents dwc currently defines a couple of dwc specific properties, for example to indicate the status of a term: dwcattributes:statusrecommended</dwcattributes:status>
In our cleanup branch [1] of dwc that we worked on we decided it would be better to make the current terms the normative document [2] Any advice on how to better model the RDF so it is usable for ontologies is highly appreciated. We basically followed the existing approach which did not use OWL. I vaguely remember during the TDWG ontology discussions that it was preferred then to just stick with RDF schema to allow maximu reuse?
Markus
[1] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/tree/dwc_cleanup [2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On 21 Jan 2015, at 21:03, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
With respect to item 1:
I would support changing to a different RDF document from http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf to something else. When a semantic client dereferences a DwC term and requests content-type: application/rdf+xml, it is not served the normative document. It gets a different one (dwcterms.rdf ?). At least this is what happened in the past when I tested this. It has never been clear to me how a client is supposed to "follow its nose" to find the normative definitions. The normative document is further complicated by having URIs with appended dates which I suppose are connected to the non-dated versions in some way - again, I'm not clear how.
It seems more straightforward to me for the normative document to contain the URIs and metadata for the most recent (undated) versions of all terms, whether they be recommended or deprecated. If a term is deprecated, it shouldn't "disappear from sight". Rather, its metadata should indicate that it's deprecated using the standard property:
<owl:deprecated rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true</owl:deprecated> I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated. Whether we want humans to see them on a quick reference guide is another story.
Please note that I'm not taking a position on items 2 or 3. Item one simply maintains the status quo (normative document=RDF) and just substitutes one particular document with another.
Steve
Steve Baskauf wrote:
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts:
- should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF document?
- should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF?
- should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process?
- should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote: > Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative." > > While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way. > > > > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/ > > -----Original Message----- > From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris > Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 > To: John Wieczorek > Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List > Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance > > John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this > > I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1). > > Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. > If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it. > > More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents. > > This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. > (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1]) > > Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object. > > My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: > "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory. > > Bob Morris > > [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting > [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema > [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/ > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote: >> Dear all, >> >> Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition >> of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've >> taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to >> the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the >> human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of >> current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities >> to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal. >> >> We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be >> made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than >> Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to >> make that new normative document the only document in the standard. >> >> Under this proposal: >> >> 1) the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single >> document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active). >> >> >> 2) information currently held in >> http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative >> document) and the corresponding Complete History web page >> (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained >> only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not >> currently active). >> >> >> 3) all documents other than the proposed normative document would not >> be part of the standard. >> >> >> The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing >> rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal >> must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent >> consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where >> consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition. >> >> >> The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important >> is that the rules governing changes to the standard >> (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be >> a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of >> these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. >> It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If >> so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard >> until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which >> point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core. >> >> >> Other comments about the proposed changes: >> >> >> Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid >> confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the >> normative document. >> >> >> Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, >> superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin >> Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions >> of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that? >> >> >> Having no document other than the normative one as part of the >> standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core >> documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive >> Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open >> to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands. >> >> >> We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have. >> >> >> Please share your comments! >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> >> John >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> tdwg-content mailing list >> tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org >> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content >> > > > > -- > Robert A. Morris > > Emeritus Professor of Computer Science > UMASS-Boston > 100 Morrissey Blvd > Boston, MA 02125-3390 > > > Filtered Push Project > Harvard University Herbaria > Harvard University > > email: morris.bob@gmail.com > web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ > web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org > http://wiki.datakurator.net > http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ > http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram > _______________________________________________ > tdwg-content mailing list > tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org > http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content >
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
I'm not sure whether anyone ever established that there was a consensus on this, but it has been suggested repeatedly that the basic Darwin Core vocabulary should have minimal restrictions and semantics imposed upon it. This allows other layers to be built upon it (XML schemas, RDF-based ontologies, etc.) that are intended to serve more specialized purposes. From the standpoint of the normative RDF document, that means that it should include very little in the way semantics that would create entailments for semantic clients. That doesn't mean that there is no value in having that RDF, because the resources defined by that document can be nodes that can be linked and restricted by other ontologies. This has been done or is being done by Darwin-SW and BCO, for example.
Having the RDF document contain few machine-interpretable properties is a separate issue from whether it is a good idea for that document to be normative. Bob makes a good point that if it is the normative document yet does not contain the information required for defining how the terms should be used, it may be inadequate. We already have that situation with the Dublin Core terms. Since they are defined as RDF by DCMI, we don't include them in our normative RDF document. So if potential users were to try to use Darwin Core by looking solely at the normative document (which they should be able to do, at least in theory), they would not know that Darwin Core includes Dublin Core terms. This is a point that should be considered in discussions on a TDWG-wide policy on vocabulary documentation. It's an even bigger issue in Audubon Core, since a much higher proportion of its terms are "borrowed" from other vocabularies than DwC.
Steve
Tim Robertson wrote:
Hi all,
I don’t think there has ever been any intention for DwC to impose that kind of restriction, regardless of the format chosen for the authoritative version (e.g. be it wiki text, RDF, HTML or PDF). I’d expect a schema to define that restriction (xsd, class definition etc).
Is that how others see it? I believe this is what John meant when he wrote the spec [1]:
"There is meant to be a clear separation between the terms defined in this standard and the applications that make use of them. For example, though the data types and constraints are not provided in the term definitions, recommendations are made about how to restrict the values where appropriate."
Cheers, Tim
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm
On 22 Jan 2015, at 06:29, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:
If dwc_normative.rdf is to be normative, will there be any specification for how to determine whether data coded to it is conformant? For example, there are some terms which, at first glance, deserve to have a cardinality restriction. Consider e.g. minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters and suppose I code DwC data against [2]. Suppose a Location <L> in my data has two triples
<L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "1.0"^^xsd:real ; <L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "2.0"^^xsd:real ;
Will there be a way that a machine can determine that such data is not conformant to dwc_normative.rdf? Or is it meant to be conformant? Or is the expectation that there is no machine-applicable specification of conformance? (In this case it's particularly hard for me to understand the utility of normative RDFS.)
Bob
[2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:44 PM, Markus Döring <mdoering@gbif.org mailto:mdoering@gbif.org> wrote:
Hi Steve,
you are right the current live RDF files are awkward, especially that the “normative” dwctermshistory.rdf document does not contain the real dwc term URIs! It only contains versioned URIs with an appended date. As you said the real terms are covered currently by dwcterms.rdf which is not normative :(
In those rdf documents dwc currently defines a couple of dwc specific properties, for example to indicate the status of a term: dwcattributes:statusrecommended</dwcattributes:status>
In our cleanup branch [1] of dwc that we worked on we decided it would be better to make the current terms the normative document [2] Any advice on how to better model the RDF so it is usable for ontologies is highly appreciated. We basically followed the existing approach which did not use OWL. I vaguely remember during the TDWG ontology discussions that it was preferred then to just stick with RDF schema to allow maximu reuse?
Markus
[1] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/tree/dwc_cleanup [2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On 21 Jan 2015, at 21:03, Steve Baskauf <steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu mailto:steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
With respect to item 1:
I would support changing to a different RDF document from http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf to something else. When a semantic client dereferences a DwC term and requests content-type: application/rdf+xml, it is not served the normative document. It gets a different one (dwcterms.rdf ?). At least this is what happened in the past when I tested this. It has never been clear to me how a client is supposed to "follow its nose" to find the normative definitions. The normative document is further complicated by having URIs with appended dates which I suppose are connected to the non-dated versions in some way - again, I'm not clear how.
It seems more straightforward to me for the normative document to contain the URIs and metadata for the most recent (undated) versions of all terms, whether they be recommended or deprecated. If a term is deprecated, it shouldn't "disappear from sight". Rather, its metadata should indicate that it's deprecated using the standard property:
<owl:deprecated rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true</owl:deprecated> I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated. Whether we want humans to see them on a quick reference guide is another story.
Please note that I'm not taking a position on items 2 or 3. Item one simply maintains the status quo (normative document=RDF) and just substitutes one particular document with another.
Steve
Steve Baskauf wrote:
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts:
- should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF
document? 2. should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF? 3. should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process? 4. should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)”
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:
> Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, > there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, > both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in > RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be > expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered > sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers > hoping to discuss the standard. > > > On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] > <eotuama@gbif.org mailto:eotuama@gbif.org> wrote: >> Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT >> to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the >> RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C >> specification pages are a rather messy mix of different >> sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and >> see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections >> marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, >> examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. >> Everything else in this specification is normative." >> >> While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think >> there is still value is using it without domain and range >> statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, >> definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way. >> >> >> >> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/ >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org >> mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org >> [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob >> Morris >> Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 >> To: John Wieczorek >> Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List >> Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed >> change in governance >> >> John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this >> >> I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was >> proposed and now oppose item 1). >> >> Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans >> to read. >> If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be >> able to argue about it and about conformance to it. >> >> More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a >> specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF >> file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C >> and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for >> specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For >> Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents. >> >> This is not to say there should not be one or more normative >> RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may >> even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, >> together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a >> privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of >> DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and >> human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that >> the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, >> calls to the MediaWiki template language. >> (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the >> future due to [1]) >> >> Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only >> human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML >> schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit >> that model. DwC is not a DwC object. >> >> My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which >> I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: >> "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, >> except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that >> I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a >> graph and that is why we should model it with a graph >> description language. Worse, my experience is that the most >> common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without >> understanding the underlying graph theory. >> >> Bob Morris >> >> [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting >> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema >> [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/ >> >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek >> <tuco@berkeley.edu mailto:tuco@berkeley.edu> wrote: >>> Dear all, >>> >>> Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the >>> transition >>> of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to >>> Github. We've >>> taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making >>> updates to >>> the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to >>> produce the >>> human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF >>> document of >>> current terms. As a result of this work, we see further >>> opportunities >>> to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on >>> the following proposal. >>> >>> We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be >>> made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core >>> rather than >>> Complete History normative document we use now. We would also >>> like to >>> make that new normative document the only document in the >>> standard. >>> >>> Under this proposal: >>> >>> 1) the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a >>> single >>> document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not >>> currently active). >>> >>> >>> 2) information currently held in >>> http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current >>> normative >>> document) and the corresponding Complete History web page >>> (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained >>> only in a history document >>> http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not >>> currently active). >>> >>> >>> 3) all documents other than the proposed normative document >>> would not >>> be part of the standard. >>> >>> >>> The proposed changes require community consensus under the >>> existing >>> rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the >>> proposal >>> must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent >>> consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, >>> where >>> consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition. >>> >>> >>> The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most >>> important >>> is that the rules governing changes to the standard >>> (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no >>> longer be >>> a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of >>> these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within >>> Darwin Core. >>> It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the >>> moment. If >>> so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core >>> standard >>> until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at >>> which >>> point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the >>> Darwin Core. >>> >>> >>> Other comments about the proposed changes: >>> >>> >>> Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace >>> will avoid >>> confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the >>> normative document. >>> >>> >>> Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, >>> superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what >>> Dublin >>> Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old >>> versions >>> of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that? >>> >>> >>> Having no document other than the normative one as part of the >>> standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core >>> documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive >>> Committee approval. This would make that documentation much >>> more open >>> to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands. >>> >>> >>> We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have. >>> >>> >>> Please share your comments! >>> >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> >>> John >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> tdwg-content mailing list >>> tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org >>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> Robert A. Morris >> >> Emeritus Professor of Computer Science >> UMASS-Boston >> 100 Morrissey Blvd >> Boston, MA 02125-3390 >> >> >> Filtered Push Project >> Harvard University Herbaria >> Harvard University >> >> email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com >> web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ >> web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org >> http://wiki.datakurator.net >> http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ >> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram >> _______________________________________________ >> tdwg-content mailing list >> tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org >> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content >> > > > > -- > Robert A. Morris > > Emeritus Professor of Computer Science > UMASS-Boston > 100 Morrissey Blvd > Boston, MA 02125-3390 > > > Filtered Push Project > Harvard University Herbaria > Harvard University > > email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com > web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ > web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org > http://wiki.datakurator.net > http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ > http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram > _______________________________________________ > tdwg-content mailing list > tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org > http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org mailto:tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com mailto:morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Dublin Core tackles the issue of borrowing from other vocabularies through the construct of Dublin Core Application Profiles [1] something separate from the specification of DC itself.
Éamonn
[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/2009/05/18/profile-guidelines/
From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Steve Baskauf Sent: 22 January 2015 15:41 To: Tim Robertson Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List; "Markus Döring (GBIF)" Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
I'm not sure whether anyone ever established that there was a consensus on this, but it has been suggested repeatedly that the basic Darwin Core vocabulary should have minimal restrictions and semantics imposed upon it. This allows other layers to be built upon it (XML schemas, RDF-based ontologies, etc.) that are intended to serve more specialized purposes.
From the standpoint of the normative RDF document, that means that it should
include very little in the way semantics that would create entailments for semantic clients. That doesn't mean that there is no value in having that RDF, because the resources defined by that document can be nodes that can be linked and restricted by other ontologies. This has been done or is being done by Darwin-SW and BCO, for example.
Having the RDF document contain few machine-interpretable properties is a separate issue from whether it is a good idea for that document to be normative. Bob makes a good point that if it is the normative document yet does not contain the information required for defining how the terms should be used, it may be inadequate. We already have that situation with the Dublin Core terms. Since they are defined as RDF by DCMI, we don't include them in our normative RDF document. So if potential users were to try to use Darwin Core by looking solely at the normative document (which they should be able to do, at least in theory), they would not know that Darwin Core includes Dublin Core terms. This is a point that should be considered in discussions on a TDWG-wide policy on vocabulary documentation. It's an even bigger issue in Audubon Core, since a much higher proportion of its terms are "borrowed" from other vocabularies than DwC.
Steve
Tim Robertson wrote:
Hi all,
I dont think there has ever been any intention for DwC to impose that kind of restriction, regardless of the format chosen for the authoritative version (e.g. be it wiki text, RDF, HTML or PDF).
Id expect a schema to define that restriction (xsd, class definition etc).
Is that how others see it? I believe this is what John meant when he wrote the spec [1]:
"There is meant to be a clear separation between the terms defined in this standard and the applications that make use of them. For example, though the data types and constraints are not provided in the term definitions, recommendations are made about how to restrict the values where appropriate."
Cheers,
Tim
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm
On 22 Jan 2015, at 06:29, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
If dwc_normative.rdf is to be normative, will there be any specification for how to determine whether data coded to it is conformant? For example, there are some terms which, at first glance, deserve to have a cardinality restriction. Consider e.g. minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters and suppose I code DwC data against [2]. Suppose a Location <L> in my data has two triples
<L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "1.0"^^xsd:real ; <L> dwc:minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters "2.0"^^xsd:real ;
Will there be a way that a machine can determine that such data is not conformant to dwc_normative.rdf? Or is it meant to be conformant? Or is the expectation that there is no machine-applicable specification of conformance? (In this case it's particularly hard for me to understand the utility of normative RDFS.)
Bob
[2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:44 PM, Markus Döring mdoering@gbif.org wrote:
Hi Steve,
you are right the current live RDF files are awkward, especially that the normative dwctermshistory.rdf document does not contain the real dwc term URIs! It only contains versioned URIs with an appended date. As you said the real terms are covered currently by dwcterms.rdf which is not normative :(
In those rdf documents dwc currently defines a couple of dwc specific properties, for example to indicate the status of a term: dwcattributes:statusrecommended</dwcattributes:status>
In our cleanup branch [1] of dwc that we worked on we decided it would be better to make the current terms the normative document [2] Any advice on how to better model the RDF so it is usable for ontologies is highly appreciated. We basically followed the existing approach which did not use OWL. I vaguely remember during the TDWG ontology discussions that it was preferred then to just stick with RDF schema to allow maximu reuse?
Markus
[1] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/tree/dwc_cleanup [2] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/dwc_cleanup/terms/dwc_normative.rdf
On 21 Jan 2015, at 21:03, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
With respect to item 1:
I would support changing to a different RDF document from http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf to something else. When a semantic client dereferences a DwC term and requests content-type: application/rdf+xml, it is not served the normative document. It gets a different one (dwcterms.rdf ?). At least this is what happened in the past when I tested this. It has never been clear to me how a client is supposed to "follow its nose" to find the normative definitions. The normative document is further complicated by having URIs with appended dates which I suppose are connected to the non-dated versions in some way - again, I'm not clear how.
It seems more straightforward to me for the normative document to contain the URIs and metadata for the most recent (undated) versions of all terms, whether they be recommended or deprecated. If a term is deprecated, it shouldn't "disappear from sight". Rather, its metadata should indicate that it's deprecated using the standard property:
<owl:deprecated rdf:datatype="&xsd;boolean">true</owl:deprecated> I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated. Whether we want humans to see them on a quick reference guide is another story.
Please note that I'm not taking a position on items 2 or 3. Item one simply maintains the status quo (normative document=RDF) and just substitutes one particular document with another.
Steve
Steve Baskauf wrote:
I should have said this in my earlier message, but many thanks to John, Peter, and Markus for getting things streamlined and moved to GitHub.
I think that it would be best to break this proposal into four parts: 1. should we change the identity and form of the DwC normative RDF document? 2. should the DwC normative document be expressed as RDF? 3. should a single normative document be the entire standard, with other supporting documents being outside of the standard and modifiable without going through an official process? 4. should the DwC namespace policy be adopted TDWG-wide?
Each of these parts need to be discussed separately - having them as a package makes it difficult to say "I support the proposal" or "I oppose the proposal". I feel that item 1 could be addressed during a public comment period and action taken based on the outcome of that discussion. It's really a technical issue. But items 2-4 are really policy decisions about process that I don't think can be addressed effectively on an email list. I think they would be better addressed as a task group level, with an examination of what has and hasn't worked for TDWG and other organizations, a record of discussion, list of pros-and-cons, and a consensus recommendation by the task group, all documented on a wiki or in a report. At that point, those who care can review the recommendations and comment on tdwg-content. We've learned in the past that tdwg-content just isn't an effective way to hash out these complicated kind of decisions.
Steve
Markus Döring wrote:
Bob, I am surprised about the dislike of RDF being normative for DwC. This has been the case for years[1] and noone did mind. The changes we propose focus on keeping out the history and the namespace policy document.
The issue I would like to think about a little more is how to best deal with deprecated terms. Is it good enough if those term URIs would resolve to a section within the html history document or do we need to return rdf for them?
Markus
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/ "The normative document for the terms [RDF-NORMATIVE] is written in the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
On 21 Jan 2015, at 17:34, Bob Morris morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
Be wary; very, very wary. If RDF is the normative artifact for DwC, there will be ambiguity about Containers and, less so, about Lists, both of which are somewhere between non-existent and horrifying in RDF. My prediction is that "DwC.rdf" will end up needing to be expressed in OWL, and that the specification of lists, of unordered sets, and of cardinality restrictions, will mystify most readers hoping to discuss the standard.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] eotuama@gbif.org wrote:
Seems like RDF expression in combination with a privileged XSLT to human readable doc might do. I still like the idea of the RDF doc as the normative one. At least it is concise. The W3C specification pages are a rather messy mix of different sections some headed by "This section is non-normative.", and see, e.g., the page for the DCAT vocab [1] "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative."
While RDF might excel as a graph definition langauge, I think there is still value is using it without domain and range statements (if these don't exist) to simply define labels, definitions and comments (examples) in a machine readable way.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: 21 January 2015 15:13 To: John Wieczorek Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance
John et al. Thanks for all the work you've put into this
I favored this at first, but thought a lot since it was proposed and now oppose item 1).
Short argument: RDF is meant for machines to read, not humans to read. If an RDF document is normative, mainly RDF experts will be able to argue about it and about conformance to it.
More(?) important, RDF is a graph definition language, not a specification definition language. Not even RDF has an RDF file as its normative definition. In fact, it seems both W3C and IETF regard most (all?) of their normative artifacts for specification (respectively "Recommendation" and "Request For Comment") as nothing other than human readable documents.
This is not to say there should not be one or more normative RDFS serializations of a human readable specification. It may even be that there should be a privileged RDFS document, together with a privileged transformation (e.g. in xslt) and a privileged platform for synthesizing a human readable form of DwC. But it's that web document that should be normative (and human readable.) This is what Audubon Core does, except that the base "generation data" comprises, annoyingly, but robustly, calls to the MediaWiki template language. (The annoyance of designing MediaWiki templates may ease in the future due to [1])
Certainly there are exceptions to the principle of "make only human readable as the base normative artifact". The XML schemaSchema [2] is an in example. But DwC doesn't seem to fit that model. DwC is not a DwC object.
My position is a little influenced by [3], a lot of with which I disagree. But it reminds me of something my Daddy taught me: "multi-purpose tools are often poor at all their purposes, except in simple cases." But really, my reluctance here is that I see no reason we should imagine that DwC data is always a graph and that is why we should model it with a graph description language. Worse, my experience is that the most common potholes in the RDF world arise when using it without understanding the underlying graph theory.
Bob Morris
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#normative-schemaSchema [3] http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM, John Wieczorek tuco@berkeley.edu wrote:
Dear all,
Peter Desmet, Markus Döring, and I have been working on the transition of Darwin Core maintenance from the Google Code Site to Github. We've taken the opportunity to streamline the process of making updates to the standard when they are ratified, such as scripts to produce the human-readable content and auxiliary files from the RDF document of current terms. As a result of this work, we see further opportunities to simplify the maintenance of the standard. They center on the following proposal.
We would like to propose that the RDF document of current terms be made to represent the normative standard for Darwin Core rather than Complete History normative document we use now. We would also like to make that new normative document the only document in the standard.
Under this proposal:
1) the normative standard for Darwin Core would consist of a single document at http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/dwc_normative.rdf (not currently active).
2) information currently held in http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/rdf/dwctermshistory.rdf (the current normative document) and the corresponding Complete History web page (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/index.htm) would be retained only in a history document http://rs.tdwg.org/terms/history.html (not currently active).
3) all documents other than the proposed normative document would not be part of the standard.
The proposed changes require community consensus under the existing rules of governance of the Darwin Core. This means that the proposal must be under public review for at least 30 days after an apparent consensus on the proposal and any amendments to it is reached, where consensus consists of no publicly-shared opposition.
The implications of this proposal are many. One of the most important is that the rules governing changes to the standard (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm) would no longer be a part of the standard. Instead, we would promote the adoption of these rules across TDWG standards rather than just within Darwin Core. It may be that TDWG is not ready to accommodate this at the moment. If so, the Namespace Policy could remain within the Darwin Core standard until the broader governance process for TDWG can cover it, at which point we would propose to remove the Namespace Policy from the Darwin Core.
Other comments about the proposed changes:
Having one RDF document for the terms in the dwc namespace will avoid confusion. Only those with status 'recommended' would be in the normative document.
Having the term history (all versions, including deprecated, superseded, and recommended ones) in a web page only is what Dublin Core does. It means no one would be able to reason over old versions of the Darwin Core. Would anyone do that?
Having no document other than the normative one as part of the standard would free the whole rest of the body of Darwin Core documentation from the requirements of public review and Executive Committee approval. This would make that documentation much more open to broader contributions and easier to adapt to evolving demands.
We do not propose to lose any of the documentation we have.
Please share your comments!
Cheers,
John
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-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390
Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University
email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org http://wiki.datakurator.net http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/ http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu http://vanderbilt.edu/trees
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: PMB 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 322-4942 If you fax, please phone or email so that I will know to look for it.
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu http://vanderbilt.edu/trees
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participants (11)
-
Bob Morris -
Chuck Miller -
Hilmar Lapp -
James Macklin -
joel sachs -
John Wieczorek -
Markus Döring -
Paul J. Morris -
Steve Baskauf -
Tim Robertson -
Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF]