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

[Simon.Cox at csiro.au]

A property to indicate membership in an ontology appears to be missing from the standard semweb stack. 
Some folks use rdfs:isDefinedBy to point from resources to an ontology, but rdfs:isDefinedBy is also used for other things. 
AFAIK there is no inverse-ish property whose domain includes owl:Ontology that can be used to assemble a set of classes and properties to be deemed to be part of the ontology. 
I sometimes use dct:hasPart but that doesn't seem quite strong or specific enough. 
Maybe just rdfs:member . 

Simon 

-----Original Message-----

Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 16:35:36 +0100
From: ?amonn ? Tuama [GBIF] <eotuama at gbif.org>
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change	in
	governance
To: "'Steve Baskauf'" <steve.baskauf at vanderbilt.edu>,	"'Tim
	Robertson'" <trobertson at gbif.org>
Cc: 'TDWG Content Mailing List' <tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org>,
	'"Markus D?ring (GBIF)"' <mdoering at gbif.org>
Message-ID: <00d101d03659$119e2330$34da6990$@org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dublin Core tackles the issue of ?borrowing? from other vocabularies through
the construct of Dublin Core Application Profiles [1] ? something separate
from the specification of DC itself.

?amonn

 

[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/2009/05/18/profile-guidelines/

 

From: tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org
[mailto:tdwg-content-bounces at lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Steve Baskauf
Sent: 22 January 2015 15:41
To: Tim Robertson
Cc: TDWG Content Mailing List; "Markus D?ring (GBIF)"
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Darwin Core Standard - proposed change in
governance

 

I'm not sure whether anyone ever established that there was a consensus on
this, but it has been suggested repeatedly that the basic Darwin Core
vocabulary should have minimal restrictions and semantics imposed upon it.
This allows other layers to be built upon it (XML schemas, RDF-based
ontologies, etc.) that are intended to serve more specialized purposes.
>From the standpoint of the normative RDF document, that means that it should
include very little in the way semantics that would create entailments for
semantic clients.  That doesn't mean that there is no value in having that
RDF, because the resources defined by that document can be nodes that can be
linked and restricted by other ontologies.  This has been done or is being
done by Darwin-SW and BCO, for example.  

Having the RDF document contain few machine-interpretable properties is a
separate issue from whether it is a good idea for that document to be
normative.  Bob makes a good point that if it is the normative document yet
does not contain the information required for defining how the terms should
be used, it may be inadequate.  We already have that situation with the
Dublin Core terms.  Since they are defined as RDF by DCMI, we don't include
them in our normative RDF document.  So if potential users were to try to
use Darwin Core by looking solely at the normative document (which they
should be able to do, at least in theory), they would not know that Darwin
Core includes Dublin Core terms.  This is a point that should be considered
in discussions on a TDWG-wide policy on vocabulary documentation.  It's an
even bigger issue in Audubon Core, since a much higher proportion of its
terms are "borrowed" from other vocabularies than DwC.

Steve

Tim Robertson wrote: 

Hi all, 

 

I don?t think there has ever been any intention for DwC to impose that kind
of restriction, regardless of the format chosen for the authoritative
version (e.g. be it wiki text, RDF, HTML or PDF).

I?d expect a schema to define that restriction (xsd, class definition etc).

 

Is that how others see it? I believe this is what John meant when he wrote
the spec [1]:

 

"There is meant to be a clear separation between the terms defined in this
standard and the applications that make use of them. For example, though the
data types and constraints are not provided in the term definitions,
recommendations are made about how to restrict the values where
appropriate."

 

Cheers,

Tim

 

[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm