[OSGeo-Standards] What terms should go into an OSGeo Glossary?

[Cameron Shorter]

** Apparently Ron's email below bounced from the standards list. **

Hi Ron,

I like your suggestion, and your offer to help set it up fits well with 
the "do-ochracy" principle of open source software. This can be the 
first term to the glossary.

Do-ochracy: The principle where the person who volunteers to do the work 
gets to decide how it gets done.

I guess the next step is to work out how to set this up, and I'm keen to 
get some answers to my question below about what fields we should 
collect for our first dataset that we use to seed the glossary.

Cheers, Cameron

On 28/9/19 2:18 pm, Ronald Tse wrote:
> Thank you Cameron for bringing up this topic to the general list. Allow 
> me to start with an introduction to myself, I am Ronald Tse, a member of 
> ISO/TC 211’s TMG; our company Ribose operates ISO/TC 211’s MLGT online 
> as Geolexica (https://www.geolexica.org), we are also a member of the OGC.
> 
> I’ve had a discussion with Reese, the convenor of the TC 211 TMG on the 
> topic and wanted to make some recommendations. Authoritative terminology 
> is always tricky. Due to the nature of ISO terms provided in the TC 211 
> MLGT, they can never be as responsive to the immediate needs of the 
> community because they have to go through a defined process of 
> standardization. Yet there is also a strong need with settling on 
> terminology for unique concepts early on to facilitate innovation and 
> interoperability.
> 
> We believe that for OSGeo and OSGeoLive, the motivation is to provide 
> consistent terminology across OSGeo (OSGeoLive, projects, documentation, 
> guides). Each organization has unique contexts and will need unique 
> terms that may not be importable from external sources. OSGeo will be 
> best served by an organization-wide glossary. That said, the content of 
> the OSGeo glossary should maximize reuse of terms in current use, 
> especially those from international and industry standards (ISO, OGC). I 
> don’t think there is a conflict here as OGC (Scott) has previously 
> stated the desire to reuse ISO terms.
> 
> The suggestion to harmonize terminology fields is kind of a straw man; 
> the terms supplied by ISO and OGC NA are mostly aligned (or at least 
> supposed to be aligned). The key is how to facilitate OSGeo’s glossary 
> to reference concepts provided by these term sources.
> 
> Here’s our suggestion. The data in the MLGT is unlikely to directly 
> accept crowdsourced terminology because it is a product of ISO/TC 211’s 
> processes, work there will require a much longer (and larger) discussion 
> amongst its experts and member bodies. However, Geolexica’s goal is 
> really to have a way of displaying global geoinformation terminology, 
> and is open to supporting extra glossaries.
> 
> For example, we could create a separate site (e.g. 
> https://osgeo.geolexica.org or whatever) with terms entirely supplied by 
> OSGeo for the use of OSGeo. We could also help provide the necessary 
> information for OSGeo to run such a site if necessary.
> 
> This would easily support crowdsourced terms and give you a way to 
> supply machine-readable terminology. It will give you what Geolexica 
> provides today, a data model for concepts and terms, as well as the 
> ability to directly refer to and source from ISO and OGC NA terms. This 
> allows the OSGeo glossary to be flexible to change while providing 
> authoritatively-sourced terms.
> 
> Whether this proposal can be officially supported by ISO/TC 211 is a 
> separate discussion that has to occur in the TC, but initially we 
> believe the TC 211/TMG is open to the idea. Our company is happy to 
> assist OSGeo with such a setup and its operation, if necessary, for the 
> support of the OSGeo and in general open source initiatives. I’m sure 
> Gobe would also be able to suggest collaborative next steps to perhaps 
> allow importing OSGeo terms into the OGC NA (e.g. via machine import), 
> or other ways of working together on terminology.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Kind regards,
> Ron
> 
> _____________________________________
> 
> Ronald Tse
> Ribose Inc.
> 

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technology Demystifier
Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254