Ecoterm

Action Points for the Following Year

The following points are based on a presentation by Alistair Miles at the 2005 Berlin Ecoinformatics meeting.

Identity

• Ecoterm members are a community within a global information environment
• → When choosing standards and designing systems for interoperability, should anticipate and allow for …
  • Unlimited expansion
  • Novel interaction
• A standard mechanism for identifying things independent of context is key to scalable interoperability
• Principles of good URI use
  • Architecture of the WWW Volume One
    • W3C Recommendation
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
• Managing URIs
  • SWBPD-WG Vocabulary Management TF
    • Publish soon (hopefully)

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Construction

• Standards for building a ‘good’ terminological/conceptual thing …
  • Relevant because if two things constructed according to the same basic principles then likely improve interoperability
• Two new proposed standards …
  • BS 8723
    • "Structured Vocabularies for Information Retrieval"
    • Intended to replace
      • ISO 2788-1986 Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri = BS 5723:1987
      • ISO 5964-1985 Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri = BS 6723:1985
    • Parts relevant to construction …
      • Part 2: thesauri
      • Part 3: other types of vocabulary
    • (Other parts …)
      • Part 1: glossary
      • Part 4: mapping
      • Part 5: “interoperability with applications”

• • ANSI Z39.19
    • Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies
    • Ballot period April 11 – May 25, 2005
    • Abstract
• Also …
  • Ontology Engineering Patterns TF (SWBPD-WG)
    • OWL
    • Published various documents:
      • Classes as values
      • N-ary relations
      • Value partitions/value sets
      • Simple part-whole relations
      • Qualified cardinality constraints

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