[tdwg-tag] Creating a TDWG standard for documenting Data Standards

[Dag Endresen [GBIF]]

Dear Steve,

Many thanks for bringing up the documentation practices
for controlled vocabularies, and also for offering to take the lead on
writing a first draft. Do you envision that the guidelines for providing
documentation on a controlled (value) vocabulary might be included as
part of the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification
(http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/)? And to eventually move to seek
ratification for this standard initiated by Roger Hyam some years
ago...? Or could these RDF guidelines be seen more as the kind of Type 3
(or type 2) documents that Roger describes with the proposed
documentation specification standard.

I have been following the first
discussions on the TDWG-RDF Google Group with great interest. The
discussion on how to report values as literals when a term is declared
with the range to be a non-literal resource type has been very
educational for me to follow. It seems to me that this is still a topic
under exploratory discussion in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
group, however some guidelines for the TDWG best practices would be
valuable! A large part of the RDF vocabulary guidelines would probably
be on a less technically detailed level?

Do you think that the same
guidelines can cover the scope for both the RDF vocabularies of terms
and the controlled value vocabularies? My thinking is that either terms
or controlled values can be described as concepts in a basic RDF
vocabularies - and that these concepts can be re-used in derived
resources such as the Darwin Core Archive extensions and vocabularies
(or re-used by ontologies). The best practices for constructing a
vocabulary defining concepts intended either as controlled values or
concepts intended as terms could be largely the same?

Our intention for
the proposed VoMaG task group is to look at the management practices for
vocabularies - including the evaluation of some tools to support an
expert group formed to be in charge of such a vocabulary [1]. The KOS
Wiki [2] is one such tool I am particularly interested to get feedback
on. The KOS Wiki (Semantic MediaWiki) is based on the recommendations
and role model of the Species-ID Wiki [3]. The KOS Wiki is for testing
purposes and similar in many ways to the Species-ID Wiki. The Wiki tool
could be used as a platform for collaborative management of vocabularies
and their concepts. The normative RDF vocabulary could then be based on
the RDF descriptions extracted from the Wiki. [Welcome to make contact
for a username to test the demo KOS Wiki!].

[1]
http://kos.gbif.org/
[2] http://kos.gbif.org/wiki/Main_Page
[3]
http://species-id.net/wiki/Category:Term

Best regards
Dag 
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