Re: vocabs and issue 166

Hi Annette,

Thanks again for your message and all your effort on improving the DWBP
dpcument! Please, find my comments below.

2016-04-15 22:01 GMT-03:00 Annette Greiner <amgreiner@lbl.gov>:

> 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.
>

I'd like to say that there is an open issue for this subject [2]. This
issue was raised more recently and included in the current draft [3] to
give us the opportunity to have more feedback from the community.
Considering that we don't have a consensus about this in our group, it
would be great to have more external feedback about this. But, considering
our new schedule, I think we will need to solve this before the next draft
publication. So, let's continue with the discussion :)


>
> 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.
>

I think BP 15 and BP16 were rewritten after our F2F meeting in September
according the resolutions that were taken. However, as you said, it seems
that differences between them are still not clear.
IMHO I don't think they are confusing, because BP15 concerns data values
and BP16 concerns attributes. But, it is important to know the opinion of
other members as well.

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
>

The resolutions made on September were implemented in the draft [3].

BP 15 explicitly refers to code lists and other commonly used terms: "Using
standardized lists of codes other commonly used terms for data and metadata
values as much as possible helps avoiding ambiguity and clashes between
these values."

The introduction of the Vocab section was rewritten to include "terms or
attributes" and it says:  "According to W3C, vocabularies
<http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ontology> define the concepts and
relationships (also referred to as “terms” or “attributes”) used to
describe and represent an area of concern. "


> 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.
>


I think  the proposal to clarify the intent of BP was through the
clarification of the meaning of vocabulary, which was done in the
introduction (based on the resolution). So, there was a proposal and a
resolution was also implemented. However, I understood  you don't agree
with the final result. In this case, it would be great if you have a new
proposal of how to solve this issue. I think our discussion can be more
productive if we have something more concrete to discuss.

Thanks a lot!
Bernadette

[2] https://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/track/issues/253
[3] http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#dataVocabularies


>
> [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
>
>
>


-- 
Bernadette Farias Lóscio
Centro de Informática
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil
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