Views Controlled Vocabularies

Convenor

Steve Baskauf - Vanderbilt University Heard Libraries, Nashville, TN, USA

Core members

Neil S. Cobb - Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research, Northern Arizona University, AZ, USA
Jennifer C. Girón Duque - Natural Science Research Laboratory, Museum of Texas Tech University, TX, USA
Matthew Nielsen - University of Oulu, Finland
Randy Singer - University of Michigan, MI, USA

Motivation

NOTE: this Task Group has completed its work and is no longer active.

The combination of the Audubon Core terms ac:subjectOrientation and ac:subjectPart are known colloquially as the “view” of the subject. The view is an important characteristic for searching by humans or machines for multimedia resources appropriate for a particular task.

The notes associated with ac:subjectOrientation and ac:subjectPart currently state that “No formal encoding scheme as yet exists.” The purpose of this task group is to develop the missing encoding schemes for these terms by creating two controlled vocabularies to be used as values for these two terms.

Goals, outputs and outcomes

Create controlled vocabulary terms for ac:subjectOrientation.
Create controlled vocabulary terms for ac:subjectPart.

Strategy

Any individuals with an interest in producing or consuming media with described views are welcome to participate in the task group.
Potential participants can contact the convener for more information about the group. To join, “watch” the Audubon Core repository on GitHub.
Since the controlled vocabularies constitute coordinated additions to Audubon Core, the Task Group will produce a Feature Report as required in Section 4.2.1 of the TDWG Vocabulary Maintenance Specification (VMS) prior to the development of the controlled vocabularies Target date for completion: December 2019.
Based on the community needs described in the Feature Report, the Task Group will develop the controlled vocabularies using the guidance given in Section 4.5.4 of the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification, which describes how controlled vocabulary terms will be described using SKOS vocabulary terms. The task group will follow these directions to create SKOS concept schemes to serve as the controlled vocabularies. Target date for completion: June 2020.
Following development of the vocabularies, the task group will collect implementation experience data from members of the community who have tried using the draft vocabularies with their data sets. These data will be included in an Implementation Experience Report (Section 4.2.2 of the VMS) that will be completed before submission of the vocabularies for adoption. Target date for submission for adoption: December 2020.

History and context

The definition of ac:subjectOrientation is: “Specific orientation (= direction, view angle) of the subject represented in the media resource with respect to the acquisition device.” The notes include: “Examples: ‘dorsal’, ‘ventral’, ‘frontal’, etc. No formal encoding scheme as yet exists.”

The definition of ac:subjectPart is: “The portion or product of organism morphology, behaviour, environment, etc. that is either predominantly shown or particularly well exemplified by the media resource.” The notes include: “No formal encoding scheme as yet exists. Examples are ‘whole body’, ‘head’, ‘flower’, “leaf”, ‘canopy’ (of a rain forest stand). Several anatomical ontologies are emerging in http://www.obofoundry.org/”

Summary