baskaufs
commented
8 years ago The draft Vocabulary Maintenance Specification includes section 4, which describes implementation reports and the circumstances in which they are required. I would welcome feedback on this topic, since we have no precedents in TDWG. For precedents in other organizations, see the links above as well as https://www.w3.org/2015/Process-20150901/#implementation-experience and any of the W3C implementation reports that can be found by Googling "W3C Implementation Report"
For a technical standard to progress from Proposed Standard to Internet Standard, the IETF requires at least two successful, independent interoperating implementations. In the W3C process, a working group "is NOT REQUIRED to show that a technical report has two independent and interoperable implementations as part of a request to the Director to announce a Call for Implementations. However, the working group SHOULD include a report of present and expected implementations as part of the request." Joel Sachs points out that implementation reports are often linked at the top of many W3C standards.
Is there a place in the TDWG process for requiring a demonstration that suggested features actually "work" (i.e. provide an implementation report)? I have suggested that this be a requirement for adding semantic "overlays" as a layer on top of basic vocabularies (see the hierarchy model page for more about inclusion of subvocabularies within an umbrella vocabulary). It isn't really within the charter of this TG to suggest changes to the overall TDWG process for standards development, but it is in scope to look specifically at the process by which components are added to vocabularies. For example, if there is a suggestion that rdfs:range, rdfs:subClassOr, or owl:Restriction properties be associated with a term, what would these additional semantics enable us to do that we couldn't do before? How would implementers use those properties to satisfy particular use cases?