VocInVO2: Desise change, License

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Semantics folks,

We had a nice session yesterday at the Virtual Interop; you can still
view something like draft proceedings on https://yopad.eu/p/Vocinvo2
and perhaps even contribute there.  I will produce a streamlined
version of that for the session page on the wiki at
https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpMay2020Semantics
~tomorrow and delete the pad afterwards, so when you read this after
2020-05-08, go to the wiki directly.

Meanwhile, from the consultations during and around the session I've
taken away two changes I'd like to put into place essentially
immediately.  Before I change something public-facing, I'd still like
to give the community here the chance to protest; my plan is to do
the two things some time next week.  If you think you need more time
to make up your mind, shout a "hold it".


(1) desise change.  First implementor feedback (thanks, Mark!) was
that the terms dictionary in desise could be made more
self-documenting by moving the values from lists to dicts.  For
instance, the first few terms on http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/refframe
currently look like this:

  "terms": {
    "EQUATORIAL": [
      "Equatorial",
      "Umbrella term of all equatorial frame.  Only use for old, pre-FK4 equatorial coordinates."
    ],
    "ICRS": [
      "ICRS",
      "International Celestial Reference System as defined by 1998AJ....116..516M."
    ],
    "FK4": [
      "FK4",
      "Positions based on the 4th Fundamental Katalog. If no equinox is defined with this frame, assume B1950.0."
    ],
    ...

-- while in this case it's probably rather easy to guess that the
first element of each list is the label and the second the
description ("definition"), that's not always so easy, in particular
when less love was spent on the definitions.

So, the proposal is to make this more explicit in this way:

  "terms": {
    "EQUATORIAL": {
      "label": "Equatorial",
      "description": "Umbrella term of all equatorial frame.  Only use for old, pre-FK4 equatorial coordinates."
    },
    ...

I've convinced myself the few extra bytes for the dict labels are
well worth the gain in self-containedness, and I'm sure the extra
dict/associative array/hash won't make this thing any less simple in
handling in all reasonable consumer languages.

So, I'd go ahead and update the spec *and* the desise files that are
online next week, so if people start implementing just about now
(as I've tried to charm them into) they'll see something closer to
what I hope will become REC.

Protests?  Comments?


(2) As part of a reality check with other community standards
(thanks, Carlo!) we've noticed that we've so far neglected declaring
the license our vocabularies are distributed under (if any).  At the
session, everyone either agreed to or was swayed by my arguments for
using CC-0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/; yeah,
I know, that doesn't count as a license in most jurisdictions, but it
serves the purpose).

As said above, if nobody protests I intend to add declarations to
this effect some time next week to everything under
http://www.ivoa.net/rdf, where I'll have to check if the UAT needs
some extra handling.  If someone knows good precendents for that, I'm
grateful for pointers.

What I'm wondering about: do we want to have this as part of the
standard?  And does anyone feel there's any necessity for some sort
of legelese, within or outside of the standard, stating that "if you
submit a VEP or a draft vocabulary to the Semantics working group,
you waive all copyright and related or neighboring rights on the
material submitted.  The IVOA will distribute it under conditions as
close to public domain as is possible."

Me... well, I don't have a good place for such a text and thus would
rather not have it.  But I'll easily be convinced to adopt it
somewhere.

       -- Markus