vocabs and issue 166

Hi all,
While reviewing the doc, I took a look at the vocabulary BPs and I think 
we still need to address issue 166. I'm calling this out separately from 
my regular list of issues, because it's too complicated to cover there. 
We discussed this in September, so I took a very careful look at the 
minutes [1] to figure out what we agreed to do. At this point, I believe 
that we still need to do some rewriting of BP 16. We clearly agreed to 
keep it, but it was never rewritten to reflect what we thought it was 
about. Maybe this is a new issue. We can make it a new one or reopen 166.

In short, BP 16 is still too similar to BP 15. I don't think we can 
dismiss this issue, because people outside our group have found it 
confusing. We, who have debated these issues, are biased to believe it 
is clear. Moreover, even though I've been part of the discussions, I 
still think it is unclear. I think the problem is that it was originally 
about how to write a new formal vocabulary, but we ruled that out of 
scope. It got rewritten at some point before the September discussion, 
but not in a way that clearly describes a separate BP for publishing 
datasets.

We resolved two things about this pair of BPs:

RESOLVED: That Use Standardized Terms be amended to refer to code lists 
and other commonly used terms.

RESOLVED: That Re-use vocabularies be retained but that it should refer 
to 'terms or attributes' to broaden the acceptance beyond the LD community

Looking carefully over the minutes of that discussion, I see we were 
talking about how the vocabs section could be amended to be about 
publishing rather than creation of new formal vocabularies. We agreed 
that the standardized terms BP should be about code lists, informal 
terms, community standards, as well as terms from more formal 
vocabularies, including reusing vocabs. My impression is that we all 
understood the intent on this one clearly and agreed that it was right.

For the reuse vocabs BP, we agreed that the word "vocabulary" should be 
defined as a set of attributes. This was about the case when the 
publisher needs to create an informal vocabulary of their own. We kept 
it because that's part of the task of publishing and should be included 
in order for the data to be understandable.  Some of us liked the word 
"attributes" to describe what an informal vocabulary contains rather 
than "terms". In the discussion, Max suggested the definition of vocabs 
in the *intro* be amended to include 'terms or attributes', but the 
proposal got written to say that the BP should be modified to refer to 
terms or attributes (and that's all). So there was never a proposal 
(accepted or rejected) to rewrite and clarify the intent we agreed on 
for what is now BP16.

[1] See discussion at 
https://www.w3.org/2013/meeting/dwbp/2015-09-24#resolution_21

-- 
Annette Greiner
NERSC Data and Analytics Services
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Received on Saturday, 16 April 2016 01:01:47 UTC