TDWGOntologyGovernance

Why

The TDWG Ontology needs to be developed and maintained collaboratively over a prolonged period of time - possible indefinitely. This will not be possible without a system of management/curation. This page is to develop a system of management.

The Problem

1. The ontology is a list of URIs with associated definitions (see WhatIsTheOntology for a description).
2. TDWG should only standardize concepts (URIs and their definitions) that are in use.
3. New users should be able to differentiate between accepted and experimental or draft concepts.
4. Standardization cannot change the URI as, by definition, people will be using it.

The Solution

1. The ontology is managed using a Subversion repository.
2. One branch of the repository is mapped to http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/ This is the live branch.
3. The trunk of the repository is mapped to http://rs.tdwg.org/ontdev/ This is the dev branch.
4. Changes are made to the development branch.
5. The Ontology Manager migrates (i.e. promotes) some the stable concepts from the dev branch to the live branch.
6. Concepts in the live branch have stable URIs and will be deprecated for at least a year before being deleted.
7. Concepts in the dev branch may be deleted at any time and will change their URIs if they are promoted to the live branch.
8. Concepts in the live branch may form part of a TDWG standard and will be tagged accordingly.

Ontology Manager

Currently the Ontology Manager role is being fulfilled by MarkusDoering and RogerHyam. It is envisaged that this role will always be shared by more than one person and that, in the future, a small editorial commit may be formed.

Relationship Between TDWG Standards and the Ontology

Concepts are standardized by being included in TDWG Standards. Once they have been mentioned in a standard the Ontology Manager has the responsibility of maintaining their URIs and descriptions as per the standard. Concepts must be promoted to the live branch before the standard enters the standards process.

This page had a major re-purposing on 2007-11-02. You can see the previous text using the version control at the bottom of the page.

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