Vocabularies in Trieste, and the route to PR

[Norman Gray]

Greetings, all.

Do we know what we plan to achieve as regards the Vocabularies  
document, in Trieste?  Specifically, are we planning or hoping to  
promote it from a WD[1] to PR?

Section 2.1 of the document standards document[2] says:

> After a suitable review and trial period, the chair of the Working  
> Group may promote the Working Draft to a Proposed Recommendation.   
> Such advancement should occur only when the chair of the Working  
> Group is satisfied that consensus has been reached, and more formal  
> and extensive review is now warranted.  Advancement to Proposed  
> Recommendation implies:
> 1.      The Working Group has fulfilled the relevant requirements of  
> the Working Group charter and those of any accompanying requirements  
> documents.

I believe this is satisfied.  The charter[3] mentions the production  
of an 'IVOA Standard Vocabulary' and 'Exploration of Ontologies' as  
core activities.  This doesn't directly mention the vocabularies work  
as such, but the former is enabled by it (and the vocabularies  
document was prompted by an first version of such a standard  
vocabulary, in autumn last year).  Myself, I would take 'Exploration  
of Ontologies' to include the whole range of RDF technologies and  
opportunities, as well as those activities specifically related to  
Ontologies/OWL.

> 2.      The Working Group has formally addressed issues raised  
> during the development and review process (possibly modifying the  
> technical report).

There was a substantial amount of on-list discussion before the  
document became a WD, so we're probably ahead here, if not quite at  
the stage of achieving consensus.  But more comments, and discussion  
of the existing open issues, would be welcome.

> 3.      The Working Group has reported all formal objections.

I'm not sure how 'formal objections' are lodged.  Anyone?

> 4.      Each feature of the technical report has been implemented.  
> Preferably, the Working Group should be able to demonstrate two  
> interoperable implementations of each feature. If the chair of the  
> Working Group believes that broader review is critical, the chair  
> may advance the document to Proposed Recommendation even without  
> adequate implementation experience.  In this case, the document  
> status section should indicate why the chair promoted the document  
> directly to Proposed Recommendation.

It's not obvious what constitutes an 'implementation' of the work the  
document describes.  Certainly the five SKOS vocabularies that will be  
distributed with the document could count as implementations.   
Alasdair Gray has been working on a vocabulary explorer and a mapping  
editor, and I've been looking at vocabularies in other contexts (which  
I can post about here when they're a little more complete), so those  
seem to be second-order implementations.  I think we're fairly safe on  
this aspect.

Should we adopt 'PR in Trieste' as a goal?

All the best,

Norman


[1] http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/vocabularies.html
[2] http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/DocStd.html
[3] http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaUCD/Charter-Semantics.pdf

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester