Dear Steve,
Many thanks for bringing up the documentation practices for controlled vocabularies, and also for offering to take the lead on writing a first draft. Do you envision that the guidelines for providing documentation on a controlled (value) vocabulary might be included as part of the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/)? And to eventually move to seek ratification for this standard initiated by Roger Hyam some years ago...? Or could these RDF guidelines be seen more as the kind of Type 3 (or type 2) documents that Roger describes with the proposed documentation specification standard.
I have been following the first discussions on the TDWG-RDF Google Group with great interest. The discussion on how to report values as literals when a term is declared with the range to be a non-literal resource type has been very educational for me to follow. It seems to me that this is still a topic under exploratory discussion in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative group, however some guidelines for the TDWG best practices would be valuable! A large part of the RDF vocabulary guidelines would probably be on a less technically detailed level?
Do you think that the same guidelines can cover the scope for both the RDF vocabularies of terms and the controlled value vocabularies? My thinking is that either terms or controlled values can be described as concepts in a basic RDF vocabularies - and that these concepts can be re-used in derived resources such as the Darwin Core Archive extensions and vocabularies (or re-used by ontologies). The best practices for constructing a vocabulary defining concepts intended either as controlled values or concepts intended as terms could be largely the same?
Our intention for the proposed VoMaG task group is to look at the management practices for vocabularies - including the evaluation of some tools to support an expert group formed to be in charge of such a vocabulary [1]. The KOS Wiki [2] is one such tool I am particularly interested to get feedback on. The KOS Wiki (Semantic MediaWiki) is based on the recommendations and role model of the Species-ID Wiki [3]. The KOS Wiki is for testing purposes and similar in many ways to the Species-ID Wiki. The Wiki tool could be used as a platform for collaborative management of vocabularies and their concepts. The normative RDF vocabulary could then be based on the RDF descriptions extracted from the Wiki. [Welcome to make contact for a username to test the demo KOS Wiki!].
[1] http://kos.gbif.org/ [2] http://kos.gbif.org/wiki/Main_Page [3] http://species-id.net/wiki/Category:Term
Best regards Dag