Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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A framework for managing vocabularies
Dag Endresen

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Africa (formerly America del Sud)
Date: 2013-10-31 09:20 AM – 09:35 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-05

Abstract


Vocabularies are identified as one of three core components of the TDWG technical architecture - or to use the TDWG Technical Architecture Group (TAG) analogy, one of the legs of a “three-legged-stool”. The VoMaG report proposes best practices for governance and management of such vocabularies. The report adopts the general principle of distinguishing between “concept vocabularies” for declaring fundamental terminology and “application vocabularies” that combine and reuse terminology declared by the concept vocabularies for a specific application. This distinction is modelled after the practices established by the Darwin Core and Dublin Core and is motivated by the goal of supporting maximal reuse of terms declared by concept vocabularies which can be viewed as providing a pool of re-usable terms with clear and unambiguous definitions.  TDWG should ensure that all concept vocabularies that are accepted into the TDWG terminology architecture are managed and developed by a group of experts in response to community feedback. New terms can be proposed for inclusion in one of the concept vocabularies or form the start of new concept vocabularies when a group of domain experts is ready to take responsibility for the task. These task groups should avoid declaring new terms for concepts that are already under stable maintenance by other groups outside of TDWG. Instead, such terms, if useful, should be imported into a TDWG concept vocabulary. We strongly recommend that all terms included in a concept vocabulary should have a dereferenceable identifier (URI) compatible with Semantic Web principles. When a term is reused in another vocabulary, this URI shall always be used to identify it. Terminology declared by concept vocabularies can be reused as property terms as well as class entities and controlled value elements.