boakes.org

something on #foaf a couple of days ago got me thinking…

term_status describes “the status of a vocabulary term, one of stable, unstable [or] testing“, so at some point, an unstable or untested term may mature and become stable - it can thus be documented as such and thereafter may become relied upon by third party authors*.

additionally, it is a reflection on the infancy of semantic web research that many schema find their way into common usage before the majority of their terms are stable.

the combination of these two factors leads to ambuguitity, which may be acceptable for research work where robust enginering principles can be sidestepped in order to test a few concepts, however for larger projects more explicit stability is needed.

looking forward, if it can be assumed that for any given schema a core set of terms will eventually stabilize and be declared as such:

• is it fair to say that when a term is stable, it is not necessarily complete?

for example, a term might be quite specific in definition of it’s range and domain, and may be declared stable, however it might lack an rdfs:label, rdf:comment or perhaps an owl:inverseOf. such properties (among others) are not necessary for validation of the term’s content, but may be considered equally valuable.

with this in mind:

• is there (or should there be) a set of criteria that should be met so that schema completeness is a consistent concept?
• does there exist (or is there a need for) a property which describes the “completeness” of a vocabulary term?

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*in what is a beautiful twist, the defining schema declares that term_status is itself “unstable”.