Re: [sdw] OMS Alignment (#1402)

Hi folks. Glad to see we have this conversation going - and public too :-) ... Thankyou @alexrobin 

I don't have practical experience of using the SOSA, SSN, or OMS vocabs so I can't comment with authority on the discussion points above. But I do see that the experts are in the (virtual) room.

What I do want to talk about is backward compatibility and examples ...

Here are a few salient points from the SDW-WG plenary call back in Nov 2022:

- @kjano noted that they have "billions of triples" deployed; let's not break existing systems (his or anyone elses)
- @rob-metalinkage noted that there are 3 different ways to describe observed property (?) in SOSA - and there are examples of all 3 methods deployed in the world; he wondered whether these 3 methods could be formalised as profiles?
- @kjano said that the provision of 3 distinct methods was by design (i.e., compromise), but there's a possibility for homogenisation 
- @nicholascar, @kjano, and @rob-metalinkage all noted that the (normative machine readable) examples in the SOSA documentation (?) are wrong / out of sync - which is problematic (e.g., when trying to build documentation, including examples, directly from the model)
- @nicholascar would like to see non-normative examples in the SOSA vocabulary illustrating the "unofficial" uses of the ontology - this would follow the documentation pattern used in GeoSPARQL

The observed (observable?) property discussion was also picked up by @rob-metalinkage in the Joint Geosemantics DWG / SDW-WG session at the OGC Members meeting in Feb 2023. He was talking about establishing an "ObservableProperty register" to mitigate issues around "massive duplication and lack of federation in the wild".

So. From my perspective, I think there are 3 pieces of work on the table:

1. SOSA / OMS alignment - which should aim _not_ to break backward compatibility and (given that we're updating the vocab) provides an opportunity to fix the examples
2. Developing 3 profiles of how ObservableProperty is used (plus mechanisms to declare which profile a given dataset uses)
3. ObservableProperty register.

I think point (1) is (at least partially) covered by this PR ( #1402 ) ... does it fix the examples? (should it?). Point (2) relates to the broader sematic uplift work being progressed within OGC. And point (3) is the subject of a OGC Discussion Paper that @rob-metalinkage is drafting ahead of the June OGC Members meeting.

TL;DR ... we need to assess backward compatibility, we should fix examples, and there's some other work that's in the mix but out of scope. 

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Received on Tuesday, 18 April 2023 12:46:57 UTC