[VM] Statement of interest

Hi all,

Thought I'd post a quick statement of my interest in a VM TF ...

Basically change management is what I am most interested in, although all
topics touched on by Tom's latest scope statement are relevant to me. 

Right now I am faced with the problem of how to manage a couple of RDF
schemas - SKOS-Core [1] and SKOS-Mapping [2] - which people are starting to
depend on and refer to (both schemas and supporting docs), but both of which
could see improvement and are by no means 'finished'.  In fact they are at
different stages of development, the first being quite mature, while the
second is relatively untested.

I want to set these schemas up so that they can continue to evolve in an
open way with input from a community of developers.  But I want to make sure
that any changes are not too disruptive to the user community, and hence
thought of implementing some sort of semi-formal change management process
for these schemas.  So best-practises for managing open community developed
RDF vocabs is what I need.

To share some thoughts on the overlap with THES/PORT TF ...

Some of the VM issues have come up already in the SWAD-E thesaurus
development - e.g. there was a discussion on URI policies for thesaurus
concepts, see the public-esw-archives [3].  Looking a bit further ahead -
thesauri are developed and managed in a variety of ways, and some of these
management processes are peculiar to thesauri (can be very formal or less
so, and very different from RDF vocabs like FOAF).  Clear guidelines (and
possibly an RDF schema) supporting a 'standard' thesaurus change management
process would be valuable, and really must be solved before RDF and the
semantic web can be a complete alternative for thesaurus users.

So to summarise, I have two problems to solve, one short term, the second
longer term ...

1. managing change of RDF schemas for describing thesauri, and ...
2. managing change of thesauri described in RDF.

An interesting question is whether or not these boil down to the same
thing:)

Alistair.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/skos/core.rdf
[2] http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/2003/11/21-skos-mapping
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2004Apr/ and see
also beginning of /2004May/

Received on Thursday, 17 June 2004 11:33:54 UTC