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

[James Macklin]

I am also in favour of this as I like simplicity :-)  I also think the
distinction of deprecated and obsolete is important and these distinctions
must be easily recognizable by users. I do feel that Chuck's point about
our two potentially different kinds of standards is valid and I would
challenge Steve to address this in his Vocabulary Maintenance Spec.

Also, thanks to John, Markus and Peter for making progress on the
transition! This should also make things a little easier for users...

Best,  JAmes


On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 3:03 AM, Éamonn Ó Tuama [GBIF] <eotuama at gbif.org>
wrote:

> I am in favour of this. Having a single normative document in RDF (which
> could include terms with a “deprecated status”) should greatly ease the
> management of DwC.
>
> Éamonn
>
>
>
> *From:* tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org [mailto:
> tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] *On Behalf Of *John Wieczorek
> *Sent:* 20 January 2015 16:19
> *To:* TDWG Content Mailing List
> *Subject:* [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in
> governance
>
>
>
> 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
>
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>
>
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