Hi Bernard,

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 08:21:22PM +0200, Bernard Vatant wrote:
> Thanks for the historical background but I think you missed my point
> altogether, sorry I was not clear. I was not speaking about status *of* DCMI
> terms, but of having a property defined in DCMI namespace such as
> *dcterms:status* :)

I understood your requirement to be that of saying that
certain terms in your Geonames ontology need to have a status
of quasi-obsolescence (i.e. quasi-deprecated) -- status *of*
Geonames terms. And I thought you were surprised because
we didn't have a property in a DCMI namespace to express the
relation between such a term and its status (and by analogy,
of a DCMI term to a status).

My reply, in essence, said that we have long had a notion of
_document_ status (e.g., "DCMI Recommendation") but that we
never formalized that as an RDF property, nor did we extend
the notion of status to individual terms -- actually two
separate issues -- though perhaps we should. Perhaps the point
is that we did not apply metadata recursively to the description
of the specification documents, in which case we would have needed
to coin a property for status. I believe that was actually on
our radar screen at one point but not as a priority.

Would you like to propose one? It does seem like an obvious
gap..

Re 'quasi-obsolete', the most recent FOAF spec drafts introduced a new piece of terminology: when we think some term is something we don't want to encourage further use of, and that there are probably more modern ways to say the same thing, or that the term was experimental and never really got much adoption and we're not looking to further it, we say that it is "archaic". This carries a different sense than "obsolete" or "deprecated"; specifically I don't want to make data that uses it look bad. There can be data from 2001 that used it in good faith at the time, and the data probably has clear enough meaning. It's just an archaic term, and comes with attendent risks --- eg that it might not be widely understood or supported in software.

Also btw I mentioned this draft of a draft on the SKOS list, but here it is again; http://www.w3.org/2003/06/sw-vocab-status/note.html ... curious if it could be useful to DCMI community.

cheers,

Dan