Re: vocabs and issue 166

Hi Phil,

I'm afraid this distinction won't work. As I wrote earlier:
[
- "Reuse vocabularies" is also for data values (e.g SKOS concept schemes)
- "Use standardized terms" may actually also be for fields.

Maybe the essence of the BPs would be more obvious with counter-examples:
- a standard list of fields can be implemented in two separate ontologies (this actually happened for a while in the museum domain with a model called CIDOC-CRM having two implementations), a case that doesn't really comply with the first BP.
- a vocabulary like FOAF has been widely re-used (so being a great example of the first BP) without it having a formal standard status (especially at the beginning, it was very informal)
]

Now we may want to ignore this. But in this case I'd be even in favour of grouping the two BP in one about 're-use vocabularies, even better, standardized ones'. But that wouldn't please the people who argued about spliting the BPs because they wanted to point that a standard could be re-used for every word or code in the data, not just for these artefacts that gathers resources that have URIs (the case of the vocabularies you and I think of usually). I.e. refer to levels of standardization that are not connected to using OWL and SKOS (because this is technoology-biased, you see).

Antoine

On 19/04/16 10:55, Phil Archer wrote:
> I need to spend more time on this but I agree that at present the two BPs are very similar. One thing that might help distinguish them would be to slightly amend the first title to give us:
>
> Use Standardized Terms & Code Lists (and make sure it's clear that this is  about values).
>
> Reuse Vocabularies - this is about properties and attributes.
>
> Phil.
>
>
> On 16/04/2016 16:02, Bernadette Farias Lóscio wrote:
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>

Received on Thursday, 21 April 2016 07:20:58 UTC