[tdwg-content] Public Review of the Darwin Core 'standard'

[renato at cria.org.br]

Hi John & other TDWGers,

> About the ontology, again, until there is active work in that area, I
> think the pragmatic way forward is to let it be the burden of the
> ontology to make use of terms from actual standards.

I've been thinking about this but couldn't answer before.

Since the existing TDWG Ontology is not a standard yet, I agree it's
strange to reuse things from the TDWG Ontology namespace in the proposed
DarwinCore. Except perhaps for NCD terms. As I understand, NCD is about to
become the first official piece of the TDWG Ontology.

Another possibility, not only for DarwinCore but also for other future
TDWG standards, is to use the same approach taken by NCD. By doing this,
each standard would not just be an "index of data and object properties in
the TDWG ontology" (using Tim's words from a previous message). Each
standard would actually help building the TDWG Ontology in some way.

In the case of DarwinCore, this would mean changing its namespace to the
TDWG Ontology namespace and comparing it with the corresponding elements
from the existing ontology, trying to maximize extensibility and minimize
potential conflicts with other standards in the future.

I'm not sure how much work would be involved, and I'm not saying that we
should do this. I'm just sharing some thoughts with all of you.

The thing is that without considerable funding and lots of meetings I
can't see another way to ever see an official TDWG Ontology, unless each
group takes care of a small part of it.

Best Regards,
--
Renato

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