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Vocabulary Maintenance Specification Task Group + SDS + VMS
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Create a process to govern how non-term changes should be made to vocabulary standards #7

Closed baskaufs closed 8 years ago

baskaufs commented 9 years ago

There is currently no official process for making additions or changes to vocabulary standards other than term changes. For example, it was not clear how the RDF Guide should have been added to the Text and XML Guides of Darwin Core. Section 8 of the draft Standards Documentation Specification [1] states that standards aren't versioned and that they must be replaced by a standard with a different name (although technically the "different name" could be a name with a different version number appended to the end!). For a standard that is as large and complex as Darwin Core, creating a new standard with every change to non-normative documents is simply not practical.

The process that was followed in the adoption of the DwC RDF Guide was modeled off of the Term Change Policy of the DwC Namespace Policy [2]. However, it is likely that major changes should undergo review similar to that which takes place during the ratification of a standard [3]. In the case of the DwC RDF Guide, the proposed addition was reviewed by the RDF Task Group before it was sent to public review and to the Executive for approval. [4] There was no individual expert reviewer as is the case for the review of standards.

Resolving this issue is intended to be a major milestone for creation of the Vocabulary Maintenance Specification. It is likely to be blocked by sub-issues involving details about how major and minor changes might be handled. So please feel free to create separate sub-issues and I'll block this one on them.

[1] https://github.com/tdwg/vocab/blob/master/tdwg-stds-spec.pdf [2] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/index.htm#classesofchanges [3] http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/ section on "Ratification of Standards" [4] See the section "What process has occurred in the ratification of this proposal?" at https://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/DwcRdf

baskaufs commented 8 years ago

The draft Vocabulary Maintenance Specification https://github.com/tdwg/vocab/blob/master/maintenance-specification.md deals with this issue in section 3.4, which discusses changes to documents supporting a vocabulary. That section provides guidelines for deciding the extent to which proposed changes require a full review process. It also suggests (but does not require) in Section 3.4.3 that new documents should be written, discussed, and revised on the Task Group level before they are formally submitted as a proposed change.

The specification also specifies in Section 4 the additional requirement of an Implementation Report for proposed enhancements to a vocabulary standard that go beyond the basic "bag of terms" level (i.e. semantic layers, application profiles, datatype restrictions).