Vocabulary for IVOA: splinter meeting conclusions

[Mireille Louys]

Dear Semantics group members,

Here is a summary proposed by Alberto Accomazzi, who chaired this 
meeting, for the various points we agreed on:
your comments , additions to it  are welcome and can be circulated on 
this list.

Thanks ,
-- 
Mireille Louys (Semantics chair)

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Semantics splinter meeting summary for Vocabulary curation :

It is a goal of the WG to promote the development and maintenance of 
Vocabularies
which are useful to the Astronomical community at large. The very 
existence of
the WG provides a forum where these issues can be discussed.
Since the actual work behind vocabularies is going to be performed by 
the interested
projects and individuals, the WG acknowledges the need for curators to 
choose the
most appropriate way to perform their work.
However, to ensure that these products become useful and adopted by the 
community
at large, the WG will promote the following activities and practices on 
behalf of
the IVOA members.

1. Coordination of efforts by encouraging discussion and providing 
information about the vocabularies.
   a. Discussions are most productive when conducted in person during 
the IVOA
      interop meetings but of course should also  occur via the 
Semantics WG mailing list.
   b. The WG will maintain a set of ivoa.net <http://ivoa.net> wiki 
pages documenting the current list of
      vocabularies used by IVOA standards or otherwise of interest to 
IVOA members,
      providing information about their location and curation process.

2. Promotion of best practices associated with the curation of the 
vocabularies.
   a. To the extent that these resources are going to be used by the 
community served by
      the IVOA, it is important that we allow parties involved in 
research, management
      and curation of astronomical data to provide feedback directly to 
the vocabulary curators
      and to the WG as a whole.
   b. Tracking of provenance and history: there should be a simple way 
for the curators
      and users to see what were the steps that lead to an editorial 
decision in the
      vocabulary.  Ideally this be accomplished using a version 
management system possibly
      in conjunction with a ticketing system
   c. In general, it is expected that vocabularies will grow with the 
addition of new terms.
      In order to minimize breakage, renaming of terms should be done in 
such a way that
      the deprecated term is still kept as an alternate form if the 
system allows it.
      Similarly, deletions of terms should be rare and when they occur 
should be done via
      the deprecation of the deleted term.

3. Recommendations concerning the release of new versions and their 
publications.
   a. New versions of vocabularies which are undergoing development 
should be released on a
      regular basis at the discretion of the curators and in response to 
the needs of the
      community.  Planned releases should be announced to the WG members 
so that interested
      individuals have a chance to register their opinion.
   b. Some electronic version of the released vocabulary will most 
likely be hosted by
      the curating individual or institution.  It is strongly 
recommended that machine
      readable versions of each release vetted by the WG be hosted under 
the ivoa.net <http://ivoa.net> website
      in SKOS, Turtle, and HTML format.
   c. While different vocabulary versions can be identified by 
version-specific top-level URIs,
      URIs associated with vocabulary terms should not be versioned to 
provide greater
      resiliency to the applications which make use of them.



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