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

[Chuck Miller]

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 at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces at 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-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
>