dcmi / usage

DCMI Usage Board - meeting record and decisions
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Amend DCMI Namespace Policy re: relaxing formal ranges #63

Open tombaker opened 5 years ago

tombaker commented 5 years ago

The DCMI Namespace Policy, Section 3C, says:

Changes of definitions within DCMI recommendations and/or DCMI term declarations will be reflected in the affected DCMI recommendation and/or DCMI term declaration. If, in the judgment of the DCMI Directorate, such changes of meaning are likely to have substantial impact on either machine processing of DCMI terms or the functional semantics of the terms, then these changes will be reflected in a change of URI for the DCMI term or terms in question.

The change of range to rangeIncludes for some properties should be accommodated in a more nuanced policy. Potential points to be made include the following:

It could be argued that the assignment of domains and ranges in 2008 already violated the language of the Namespace Policy, though that I can recall, nobody made this argument at the time.

kcoyle commented 5 years ago

@tombaker - In what way(s) did the range changes violate the policy?

tombaker commented 5 years ago

@kcoyle By "it could be argued", I mean that there were some terms outside of the DC-15 that were assigned formal ranges, such as license, which was originally created in 2004 but first assigned a (non-literal) range in 2008, or valid, which was created in 2000 but first assigned a (literal) range in 2008.

In both cases, it could be argued that the range assignments narrowed their semantics.

In my recollection, it was in fact recognized at the time that this would narrow their semantics, but the consensus was that this narrowing constituted an improvement, and indeed the range assignments were generally well received at the time (perhaps because the only people who really understood what they meant also liked them). I do not recall anyone arguing that the assignment of ranges would significantly hurt users in general, though there was some disagreement about specific range assignments (e.g., title as literal because of use cases such as titles in Japanese).

I'd like for us to take a closer look at the components of this policy:

stuartasutton commented 5 years ago

Tom,

kcoyle commented 5 years ago

ditto on the 'functional semantics' - is there another way to say this?