Trouble with a deprecated default

[gilles landais]

Hi,

Thank you to take into account DataCite-IVOA compatibility.

I agree that "Collected" sounds enough generic to be used. So (b) sounds 
acceptable to reduce compatibility problem and to manage the existing.


I don't know how the Date role is used in the registry. Are there exotic 
values ?
According to the existent, is it possible to force the role value with a 
controlled vocabulary?

Regards,

Gilles Landais


Le 31/01/2025 à 15:49, Markus Demleitner via registry a écrit :
> Dear Registry,
>
> During the review for VOResource 1.2 Grégory noticed (thanks!) that
> VOResource's Date element (used to define "events" in the life time
> of a resource, such as the dates of publication or updates) currently
> has something like a problem: Its @role attribute defaults to a
> deprecated term.
>
> A bit of background: Originally, the legal values of the role
> attribute were defined in the VOResource schema; you could choose
> between creation, update, and representative, the latter being the
> default.  In VOResource 1.1, we moved to defining the role via the
> vocabulary http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/voresource/date_role/, and we used
> the opportunity to align us with DataCite, which has a very analogous
> element.  The goal was that you could directly translate vr:Date to
> DataCite.
>
> For the old #creation and #update terms, there are exact matches.
>
> For the somewhat vague #representative (defined in VOResource as "A
> rough indication of the resource's time coverage") DataCite does not
> have anything sounding similar.  But #Collected actually has a
> definition that is pretty close: "A (representative) date at which
> the resource content was collected."
>
> Hence, when deprecating #representative, we said "use #Collected"
> instead.
>
> We did not change the default on Date, though, and that means that
> when you write <Date>2025-01-31</Date> that ought to produce a
> deprecation warning.  That doesn't happen so far, at least not in the
> RofR validator, but it should.  And that's arguably not a good thing.
> Or perhaps it is.
>
> Here's a few proposals for how to clean this up:
>
> (a) We keep the current behaviour and just comment: "That the
> Date/@role default value is deprecated is actually by design.  You
> see, a naked date is severely underspecified and nobody knows what to
> do with it, so just don't do it.  Give a (new-style) role."  We may
> want to add that people ought to give coverage/temporal rather than a
> Collected date (or in addition to it, if DataCite interoperability is
> desired).
>
> (b) We (more or less silently) change the default to #Collected.  I
> think that's safer than it may sound, in particular because RegTAP
> services are supposed to change #representative in #Collected on
> ingestion anyway.
>
> (c) We file a github bug against VOResource, go ahead with 1.2 next
> Wednesday and work out the problem at our leisure.  The problem has
> been there since 2012, so perhaps it *is* not all that urgent.
>
> The longer I think about it, the more I'm leaning towards (b).  So...
> if nobody protests, I'll probably go ahead and do it and `fess up at
> next week's TCG.
>
> Does anyone foresee major trouble with that plan?
>
> Thanks,
>
>            Markus
>