Re: [ALL] Basic Principles for Managing an RDF Vocabulary

Hi Tom,

Hi Everyone! I've just joined this WG. I'm Dan Brickley, I worked on RDF 
stuff at W3C for some years, and was responsible for the EU project 
SWAD-Europe that led to Alistair devoting his life to the marvels of 
SKOS. I'm also irresponsible for the FOAF project with Libby Miller, on 
which theme I'll start a separate thread here soon. More bio blah blah 
at http://danbri.org/ for anyone with time to kill. I'm very happy to 
see this WG getting going, and to be able to be a part of it.

I want to jump right in here and surface an off-list discussion with Tom 
and others, ... it was about the long term management of RDF vocabs. 
This comes from two perspectives. One, as the person responsible for 
FOAF currently, and two, as someone working on the CASPAR EU project, 
which is about digital preservation. So I have been thinking a lot about 
how today's data can be designed to be accessible in 20, 30, 50 year's 
time. And about the steps that data creators, and vocabulary managers, 
can take today, to increase the chances of long term data usability. In 
CASPAR we are based around the ISO OAIS model, ... and I've begun to 
create an ontology for that. But this thread is more about the social 
side of responsible namespace management...

Thomas Baker wrote:
> I have converted the draft we ended up with in May 2005 in
> the Best Practices WG [1] into a draft on the SWD wiki [2].
> It is linked to the Deliverables page.
>
> Tom
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/principles/20050705
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/VocabMgtDraft
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/Deliverables
>   

Well, to wrap up quick, here are some proposed bulletpoints to work into 
the draft:

very broad brush:
> 
>  - respect the trust that people have placed in your work when they use 
> your vocab
>  - keep the world appraised of your goals and plans for the vocab; 
> procedures for changing it; and your (reliably archived) mechanisms for 
> publically accepting and responding to community feedback
>  - report honestly, publically and regularly on your success in meeting 
> these goals, on difficulties encountered and any changes these might bring
>  - have externally-confirmed mechanisms in place for long term 
> persistence of some (potentially frozen) version of the vocab and its 
> machine representations (including practicalities such as domain name 
> ownership, wills and other legalities)

...ie. these are things that a "well managed" vocabulary should offer the wider community, imho. So I have two goals here: one is to get such a list of simple bullet points into the VM draft. The second is to live up to them, in the ongoing management of FOAF.

Hope that makes sense :)

All the best,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2006 15:42:18 UTC