The TDWG 'house' is organic and messy, if not in disarray. I'll explain this state with a descriptive history instead of a logical exposition.
* We changed the way TDWG approves standards (in 2006). ABCD, TCS, and SDD were the last standards approved by the old method (a vote by members). New standards simply have to pass expert and public review (as judged by the executive committee). ABCD, TCS, and SDD aren't consistent because...(blah, blah; life is hard).
* The TDWG ontology or vocabulary is NOT a standard. The terms are supposed to be taken from standards, and perhaps even non-standard schemas that are widely used. The ontology managers are supposed to apply the filter of use; terms in the ontology should be widely used. (We expect that some terms in approved standards will not be widely used.)
* With the ontology/vocabulary comes a shift or at least a broadening towards RDF (away from XML schemas), though there were/are some skeptics.
The existing pages on the TDWG vocabulary are pretty old, and I don't think there has been any kind of review "event" for these. Editing and reviewing these is on our to-do list for this year.
I think IT WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL if we put up a list of REQUIRED READING before getting into this review, and perhaps even the current review of DarwinCore. John Wieczorek and his core collaborators have drawn heavily from the DCMI initiative in shaping the most recent draft of the DarwinCore. I would really appreciate references to any other good statements about RDF and ontologies. These should go on the TAG homepage.
Matt, thanks for pointing out the emperor's clothes!
-Stan
-----Original Message----- From: mbjones.89@gmail.com [mailto:mbjones.89@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Matt Jones Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 12:51 PM To: Blum, Stan Cc: Kevin Richards; Hilmar Lapp; Technical Architecture Group mailing list; rogerhyam Hyam; Mark Schildhauer Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] Embedding specimen (and other) annotations in NeXML
This thread has prompted me to ask some naive questions about the process under which the vocabularies are formed. Maybe I'm the only one who is confused about the vocabularies, their status, and the process of forming new terms, but it seems maybe I'm not alone. And clarification on some of these points will help me with our direction on the development of the Observation Ontology under the OSR group, which I think will fit right in with Stan's point about fitting some of the concepts into a broader Observation framework.
For me there is a lot of confusion over the TDWG vocabularies, partly because they capture concepts that are present in existing TDWG standards, but are generally incomplete. For example, the TCS standard provides the field 'Specimens/Specimen', which I think is relevant to Hilmar's question. However, the listed TDWG vocabulary for TCS is the TaxonConcept vocabulary (http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept), which does not provide a class for the TCS 'Specimen' concept. In addition, the ABCD TDWG standard also seem to have a way for specimens to be represented, but they are generalized as 'Unit's with a 'RecordBasis' of 'PreservedSpecimen'. So there are at least two official TDWG 'standards' for representing Specimen information, in addition to whatever DwC does. It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to finish the LSID vocabularies for TCS and ABCD so that they completely represent the concepts in TCS and ABCD, then get that approved as a valid way to represent these TDWG standards. In the process, one could try to resolve the differences in modeling approaches employed by the different standards, such as mapping the Specimen concept in TCS to its corresponding concept in DwC and ABCD. This would help avoid multiple TDWG standards defining overlapping versions of these concepts, and let people use the vocabularies in place of the XML schema versions of these standards.
What is the process for approval of the LSID vocabularies? They seem to be bypassing the normal TDWG standards track. Some of the vocabularies have a status of 'Available' (like TaxonConcept, even though it is incomplete), while others are marked as 'Developmental'.
The page on OntologyGovernance (http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/TDWGOntologyGovernance) states: "Relationship Between TDWG Standards and the Ontology -- Concepts are standardized by being included in TDWG Standards. Once they have been mentioned in a standard the Ontology Manager has the responsibility of maintaining their URIs and descriptions as per the standard. Concepts must be promoted to the live branch before the standard enters the standards process. "
So it seems that the OntologyManager replaces the standards process for the purpose of the vocabularies. Is this correct? And does the OntologyManager make sure that concepts like 'Specimen' that are defined in TCS make it into the corresponding LSID vocabulary before it is classified as 'Available'? And how does the OntologyManager decide which concept and representation for 'Specimen' to use -- the one from TCS or the one from ABCD? Does 'Available' have the same weight as a published TDWG standard, and if so, shouldn't these vocabularies be listed on the Standards page as well? Finally, does the existence of a concept such as 'Specimen' in TCS have any bearing on the development of new standards such as DwC that may want to define the concept differently, or more completely?
Matt