[oslc-core] Vocabulary Evolution, Term Status, Improved Stylesheet

[Arthur Ryman]

We have previously discussed how to evolve vocabularies. Rather than tie 
vocabulary evolution into major specification releases, we are have a more 
incremental approach that allows new terms to be added on a test basis, 
and then be finalized based on implementation experience.

This evolutionary approach came out of FOAF whose creators defined a Term 
Status vocabulary [1]. To describe the status of a vocabulary term, add 
the property vs:term_status, which has four possible string values: 
"unstable", "testing", "stable", and "archaic".

For example, part of the Estimation and Measurement Service (EMS) 
vocabulary was adopted by the Performance Monitoring spec. [2] This caused 
a subset of EMS terms to be finalized and tagged as "stable". The 
remaining terms are tagged as "testing". More terms may be adopted by the 
PROMCODE spec, in which case they will also be promoted to "stable".

The XSLT stylesheet for generating HTML from Turtle or RDF/XML has been 
updated to handle vs:term_status. It has other improvements. The latest 
version is at [3].

[1] http://www.w3.org/2003/06/sw-vocab-status/note
[2] 
http://open-services.net/wiki/estimation-and-measurement/OSLC-Estimation-and-Measurement-Vocabulary/
[3] https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/LinkedData/PublishingRdfVocabularies
_________________________________________________________
Arthur Ryman, PhD
Distinguished Engineer | Master Inventor | Academy of Technology
Chief Data Officer, Application Platform
IBM Systems | Middleware
905.413.3077 (phone) | 416.939.5063 (cell)
IBM InterConnect 2015