Re: My review of the DWBP 21st Jan editor's draft

Hi Carlos,

Quickly reacting to this one:


> (should replace "data vocabularies" for "data models" everywhere)
> [...]
> DATA VOCABULARIES
>
> - Should be called data models or anything else more neutral (also for all BPs titles and descriptions in this section possibly with the only exception of implementation sections)
> - Get rid off (or move to another more apropriated place) all the introductory vocabularies, ontologies and skos stuff as it is not technology neutral at all
>


I wish we could call everything 'data models' or anything more precise than 'vocabulary'. The problem is that to my great dismay many people use the 'vocabulary' word for different kinds of beast. An OWL schema is not a SKOS concept scheme; the distinction is really important in Linked Data world. And it exists in other technologies: an XML schema or a relational model is quite different from a code list used in XML files or relational tables.
Bottom line, I believe that resources like the Getty Art and Architecture thesaurus [1] or the ISO 639 language codes [2] cannot qualify as data models. They're just values to be used in data (even if many data models do express constraints that are based on what such lists contain).

I have tried to write the long intro in the vocabulary section to express this. It seems I've failed :-( (and I did try to enhance a text that Ig had produced, which also tried to reflect this)
Actually it's really difficult once W3C itself contributes to the terminological quagmire by using the same word for everything [3]. And whe, actually (and to be fair to our colleagues) the border can be fuzzy, and when undoubtedly many best practices do apply across the spectrum (it's good to re-use data models *and* code lists!).

Antoine

[1] http://www.getty.edu/vow/AATHierarchy?find=&logic=AND&note=&english=N&subjectid=300000000
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1
[3] http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ontology

Received on Wednesday, 21 January 2015 23:32:37 UTC