RE: ACTION-76 Working for conformance of vocabularies

Dave et al,

For conformity, I suggest you adopt the definition in ISO/IEC Guide 2 - Standardization and related activities - General vocabulary.  Section 12.1 defines conformity as fulfillment by a product, process, or service of specified requirements.

What those requirements are may depend on the particular situation.  Take a simple spec (called A) with 3 provisions:
1) title (required)
2) modification reason (optional)
3) modified date (required if 2 is provided)
Any instance containing either of the following combination of provisions conforms:
a) 1
b) 1, 2, & 3

If one simply wants to store or write instances of spec A, then we only have to account for type a) to conform.  If we want to read instances and possibly write what we've read however, then we need to account for both types.  If some conforming system writes an instance of type b), then a conforming reader must be able to account for type b) as well as type a).

Yours,
Dan

Dan Gillman
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Office of Survey Methods Research
2 Massachusetts Ave, NE
Washington, DC 20212 USA
Tel     +1.202.691.7523
FAX    +1.202.691.7426
Email  Gillman.Daniel@BLS.Gov
----------------------------------------- 
"A foolish consistency is the 
hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen,
philosophers, and divines."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Reynolds [mailto:dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 10:05 AM
To: public-gld-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: ACTION-76 Working for conformance of vocabularies

On 27/09/12 14:54, Phil Archer wrote:
> Following my action item to "Tidy up the conformance language, 
> preferably with bullet points", I suggest the following be included as 
> the conformance statement for our vocabularies.
>
> ===Begins===
>
> Conformance to this vocabulary means:
> - *using* its classes, properties and relationships;

   - *using* them in a way consistent with semantics of those classes and properties as declared in this specification [*]

> - *using* as many of the terms as possible, but not
>    necessarily using every term;
> - *not using* terms from other vocabularies instead of ones defined
>    in this vocabulary that could reasonably be used.
>
> Applications MAY:
>
> - specify a minimum set of terms that publishers must use if their
>    data is to be processed by the application;
> - specify controlled vocabularies as acceptable values for
>    properties.
>
> This specification treats such restrictions as application-specific.
>
> ===Ends===

[*] Leaves open the question of whether we mean only formal semantics (from RDFS and OWL) or the informal semantics of the description of intention in the rdfs:comments.

Dave

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2012 16:22:52 UTC