Deprecating some of the TDWG Ontologies

[Steve Baskauf]

As part of the migration of TDWG documents to GitHub, the TDWG Ontology
files that were formally hosted on Google Code have been moved to
https://github.com/tdwg/ontology . In the process of moving them, we
have gone forward with implementing the recommendations of Section 2.6.1
the VoMaG Report [1] with regards to deprecating the ontologies that do
not appear to be in use by anyone.

This raised the more general issue of exactly how one goes about
deprecating a vocabulary when it's life is over. This has been
officially raised as an issue [2] before the Vocabulary Management Task
Group. In particular, how does one indicate to both humans and machines
that a vocabulary is deprecated and how does one point the user to
replacement vocabularies? The comments for the issue describe what I
did and you can also look directly at the diff [3] to see how I changed
the RDF. If you have any feedback on the methods I used, please comment
on the Issue #17 page [2] so that your thoughts can be considered by the
Vocab TG.

A related issue is suggesting what vocabularies should replace the
deprecated ontologies. There is a human-readable stub page [4] and a
machine-readable stub RDF/XML document [5] for recommended
replacements. I haven't really made a first pass at recommendations -
Darwin Core and Audubon Core would be obvious candidates for some of the
ontologies. FOAF and vCard are possibilities for others. I would like
to have input from the RDF TG group for fleshing out these two
documents, so if you can take a look at the list of deprecated
ontologies [6] and discuss possible replacements on this list, that
would be great.

Steve

[1] http://www.gbif.org/resource/80862
[2] https://github.com/tdwg/vocab/issues/17
[3]
https://github.com/tdwg/ontology/commit/269406d539aca780656fcdeee841860d12026dca?diff=split
[4] https://github.com/tdwg/ontology/blob/master/replacements.md
[5] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tdwg/ontology/master/replacements.rdf
[6]
https://github.com/tdwg/ontology#deprecated-components-of-the-tdwg-ontology

--
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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