Re: Evolving vocabularies

Hi Dr. Kessler,

Best Practices are emergent.  I think ADMS[1] (Phil Archer at the W3C) has it right philosophically, that is to group data about Assets in a generic Repository container.  Federalization, necessary to use the data, is an IT convention with little organizational governance value.  Oddly, building an empire turns out to be a terrible way to build an empire (or an ocean of data).


My own work is pretty consistently off-center (I'll thank you all not to elaborate at length).  But when you do think in terms of a Repository as an abstract point of federalization, the coverage map of familiar organizations looks much different than a simple listing[2].  A "big picture" can be derived from Regional Data[3], but the process of building a bigger Repository results, results only in a bigger Repository.
--Gannon


[1] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/document/adms-enabled-federation-semantic-asset-repositories-brochure
[2] http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/cctld/psp/
[3] http://www.rustprivacy.org/2012/roadmap/


________________________________
 From: Carsten Keßler <carsten.kessler@uni-muenster.de>
To: public-lod@w3.org 
Cc: Chad Hendrix <hendrix@un.org>; perrin.v@gmail.com 
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 3:11 AM
Subject: Evolving vocabularies
 
Dear LODers, 

I have already bugged this list with our Humanitarian eXchange Language project a couple times, and I'd like to hear your opinion on the following problem.

We are constantly working on the vocabulary (see http://hxl.humanitarianresponse.info/ for the latest version), so it gets revised fairly often, sometimes several times a week. While we are doing that, we are also developing our tools around the vocabulary, and we have started producing some data (you can already query the endpoint at http://hxl.humanitarianresponse.info/sparql, although there is not much there yet). 

When we are producing data, we always use the latest version of the vocabulary; obviously, that will create problems over time, say if you want to query all Camps (http://hxl.humanitarianresponse.info/ns-2012-06-14/#Camp) out of the triple store, independent of the vocabulary version. So far, each version of the vocabulary is linked to the previous version via dc:replaces, but this does not really solve our problem.

We are working towards a stable first "release" of the vocabulary at some point, but until then, we will have to work around this issue somehow. Is there any best practice for that kind of problem? Would it make sense to apply dc:replaces to every class/property that is carried over from a previous version? 

Cheers,
Carsten

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http://carsten.io