Vocabularies in the VO, Internal Working Draft

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Semantics community,

As discussed in Paris, we should come up with an update to the
Vocabularies document that covers the additional use cases that came
up over the past then years.  Our roadmap says we hope to publish a
first working draft some time in August (which is a bit steep given
it's taken me until now to produce the first internal WD; if the date
slips, it's not the end of the world, so don't be shy to raise
fundamental questions, too).

Over the past weeks, I've prepared a text we could discuss.  While a
Working Draft doesn't need to be perfect, but it should reflect a
rough consensus within the WG.  So, I'd be very grateful if you could
at least skim over http://docs.g-vo.org/vocinvo2.pdf and see if you
see major showstoppers as to "rough consensus".

There's also a few points I'd like to particularly like to raise:

* I'd really like to have a few co-authors, where the degree of
  involvement doesn't need to be terribly deep.  Call me odd, but
  single-author standards always are a bit suspicious to me.
* Do you have additional use cases?  Even if they don't immediately
  induce new requirements, they may still be valuable as the might
  later.
* Do you see additional requirements we should adopt?  As with the
  case of the non-RDF-tooling requirement, I'm not too strict about
  having all requirements be derived from concrete use cases.
* Should we perhaps drop the non-RDF-tooling requirement?  Much of
  the standard's complexity hinges on this one thing, and on my
  decision that people should then use RDF/XML.  Both the requirement
  itself and the RDF/XML choice are of course debatable.

If you have minor corrections to the text itself, you're very welcome
to directly work them into 
https://volute.g-vo.org/svn/trunk/projects/semantics/vocinvo2
(contact me for Volute credentials if you don't have any yet).

Finally, note that the files on the existing repository at
http://www.ivoa.net/rdf are different from what's described here in
many details, in particular as regards the RDF/XML.  This means that if
you're doing anything non-trivial with the files there, this would be
the perfect moment to say so.

My next step would be to bring the vocabulary processing software
(https://volute.g-vo.org/svn/trunk/projects/semantics/vocabularies)
in line with this IWD, which will probably uncover a few issues.
Once that's done, and provided there is no additional need for
discussion, I'd push the document to WD.

Thanks,

        Markus