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Introduction to VoMaG
Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Africa (formerly America del Sud)
Date: 2013-10-31 09:00 AM – 09:05 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-05
Abstract
The Vocabulary Management Task Group was formally established at the TDWG 2012 conference in Beijing as a task group under the TDWG Technical Architecture Group (TAG). The purpose and scope of VoMaG are documented in its charter[1] and centre on the best practices for the collaborative development and maintenance of vocabularies used to describe biodiversity resources. Much of the prior, substantive work that informed VoMaG grew out of the related TDWG RDF/OWL task group[2] and the EU funded ViBRANT project[3] which includes a work package dedicated to biodiversity vocabularies.
Due to the high core membership of the group (around 40), it was decided that the main means of collaboration would, in the absence of a fully functioning TDWG wiki platform, be a dedicated section of the GBIF Community Site[4]. The latter site includes pages dedicated to the main topics outlined in the charter as well as records of any discussions around them. Three main topics emerged and formed the main sections of the VoMaG report. These are: i) a review of the TDWG ontologies including status, maintenance issues, etc., ii) a proposal for a platform based on Semantic MediaWiki for developing and maintaining vocabularies, and iii) a general framework for managing vocabularies covering standards, best practices, architecture, etc. The draft VoMaG report, synthesising the content on the community site, went through several stages of review and revision, including a public review.
[1] http://community.gbif.org/pg/file/read/28812/vocabulary-management-group-vomag-charter-v1