proofreading of RDF guide completed

[Steve Baskauf]

I have completed an extensive proofreading of the RDF Guide. I have
corrected a number of minor typos, but mostly updated many URLs that
were outdated. It is shocking how unstable even the URLs of W3C
documents are, although at least the old URLs still point to some kind
of disambiguation document.

In any case, I think the guide has been revised and proofread to my
satisfaction. The only open issue I'm aware of is what to do about the
dwc:associatedWhatever terms as mentioned in previous emails. I will
let several work days elapse to see what comments come in on that before
trying to move on.

Steve

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Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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[Steve Baskauf]

OK, several days have elapsed and this is a summary of the responses to
the options for dealing with dwc:associatedWhatever terms: Three TG
members (including me as one) indicated that they were in favor of
Option 3 in the form of using dcterms:relation. A fourth person might
have expressed support (you can read the comment at
https://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/AssociatedTerms and decide for
yourself). No one was against option 3 or adamantly supported option
2. I feel that Option 3 is fairly "safe" since it doesn't mint any new
terms. Nothing would have prevented a user from implementing that
strategy before and nothing requires it to be implemented in the
future. It does, however, move 5 DwC terms out of the category "we
can't advise you on how to deal with these", which I think is a good thing.

I have written a new section for the guide (2.8 through 2.8.4) that
describes the strategy for dealing with dwc:associatedWhatever terms and
gives examples. I have also adjusted the tables in section 3 of the
guide accordingly. If anyone has major concerns with this revision,
please reply to the list. If anyone has minor issues or proofreading
comments that can be dealt with via minor editing, you can email me
off-list. I will let this vegetate until Friday. At that point, unless
additional problems surface I will do one final proofread and consider
the guide ready for the 30 day public comment period.

For reference purposes, the URL of the cover page is:
https://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/DwcRdf
It contains a link to the clean, revised version of the guide and has
links to previous versions at the end.

Steve

[Paul J. Morris]

Steve,

Excellent work.

On Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:01:25 -0600
Steve Baskauf <steve....@vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> At that point, unless
> additional problems surface I will do one final proofread and
> consider the guide ready for the 30 day public comment period.

Following on the discussion of associated___ terms, it still feels like "cannot" in 3.8 is too strong an assertion.

3.8 Darwin Core terms whose function cannot be duplicated by a dwciri: object property

Consider: dwc:measurementUnits = "m"

There are vocabularies with IRIs to represent SI units, and I don't see anything in the dwc:measurementnUnits definition that would block a dwciri:measurementUnits assertion that referenced such a vocabulary, e.g.

<dwc:measurementUnits>m</dwcMeasurementUnits>
<dwciri:measurementUnits rdf:resource="http://mimi.case.edu/ontologies/2009/1/UnitsOntology#meter"/>

Likewise, dwc:measurementDeterminedBy feels very similar to dwc:recordedBy/identifiedBy/georeferencedBy

It feels like 3.8 needs a little more examination, both the "cannot" assertion and whether any of the terms in that list can move.

-Paul
--
Paul J. Morris
Biodiversity Informatics Manager
Harvard University Herbaria/Museum of Comparative Zoölogy
mo...@morris.net AA3SD PGP public key available