[tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in governance

[joel sachs]

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-depreciated-and-obsolete
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:
>
> 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
>