The TDWG Ontology and the Darwin Core Namespace Policy. Steve Baskauf TDWG VoMaG and RDF Task Groups

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1 The TDWG Ontology and the Darwin Core Namespace Policy Steve Baskauf TDWG VoMaG and RDF Task Groups

2 Review of the TDWG Standards Process (post 2005) Task Group (TG) is chartered Task Group creates draft standard Review manager facilitates expert and public review Executive accepts standard Standard published in repository and used by community Reference:

3 Track record on TDWG Standards Current standards: Darwin Core (technical specification) vocabulary GUID and LSID (applicability statements) TAPIR (technical specification) Audubon Core (AC) vocabulary (just ratified!) Draft standards (all technical specifications): Natural Collections (NCD) vocabulary, status: stalled since 2009 Standards Documentation (SD) guidelines, status: stalled since 2008 ABCD DNA extension?, status: stalled since 2010? Reference:

4 Question: What do we do about stalled draft standards?

5 What is "supposed" to happen to Standards when they are done? From the (unratified) TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (Section 8): "Once a standard has been ratified it can not be changed but must be replaced by a standard with a different name. Relationships between related standards (i.e. old standards and their replacements) should be indicated in the Cover Page document." Reference:

6 What actually happens to Standards when they are done? Darwin Core Namespace Policy (Section 3 Term Change Policy): Minor editorial errata: corrected following notification of TAG Substantive editorial errata: notify tdwg-content, consult TAG Semantic changes in terms: Request For Comments, consult TAG Issue tracker, RFC, Executive approval Addition of new terms: Request term (issue tracker), RFC (Executive approval) Non-term-related changes: no policy (e.g. RDF guide in limbo) Reference:

7 Question: How do we maintain standards that are vocabularies?

8 More problems: The Standards Documentation Specification: isn't ratified isn't followed by Darwin Core only describes human-readable documents (The DwC normative document is in RDF/XML!)

9 Integrated Data TDWG Technical Architecture c Reference: Exchange Protocol: TAPIR Semantics: TDWG Ontology GUID: LSIDs

10 Integrated Data? TAPIR Exchange Protocol: DwC Archives Semantics: Darwin Core GUID: DwC triplet? HTTP URI? nothing? LSIDs TDWG Technical Architecture 2013 TDWG Ontology

11 Question: What do we do with the pieces of the TDWG Ontology?

12 Status of the TDWG Ontologies actually several OWL ontology documents ontology documents found in several places no active maintenance some parts in use, others not Collections ontology NCD Draft Standard Taxon Concept Schema (TCS) Standard TaxonConcept ontology

13 Recommendations: TDWG Ontology maintain/redirect URIs annotate RDF documents as deprecated where appropriate annotate websites to indicate not under active development appoint new Review Manager for NCD draft standard form a Task Group to determine fate of TaxonName, TaxonConcept, and TaxonRank ontologies

14 Recommendations: Standards Specifications Remove the Standards Documentation Specification from standards track VoMaG (?) should commission a new author team for a specification standard for human and machine-readable documents Remove references to maintenance process

15 Recommendations : Vocabulary Maintenance VoMaG (?) should commission an author team to write a vocabulary maintenance specification standard modeled after the DwC namespace policy The standard would apply to all TDWG vocabularies (Audubon Core expects this!) Clarify responsibility for vocabulary maintenance

16 General Process-related Recommendations Maintain a publicly viewable list of TAG members Review draft standards annually and make changes to authors, review managers, TG conveners, and Task Groups as necessary. TAG reviews unresolved vocabulary issues annually

17 Acknowledgements Thanks to all those who provided comments and suggestions on the report, and to my co-editors who were a dream to work with. My participation in the TDWG Annual Conference was supported by the Research Coordination Network for the Genomic Standards Consortium (RCN4GSC, DBI ) and the Scientific Observations Network (SONet, NSF # , OCI-Interop). For further information: steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu