The controlled vocabularies for the DAWE NRM protocols were originally created and managed in various different spreadsheets on Google Drive. This provided a fast and easy way to produce controlled vocabularies by domain experts who are not familiar with RDF and SKOS.
Now that we have reached a stage where bulk of the vocabularies are in maintenance and refinement, we no longer require the use of spreadsheets. The process of downloading the spreadsheets from Google Drive and transforming them into RDF adds additional burden and complexity that are no longer necessary or beneficial.
The new vocabulary management proposal is to generate the current state of the vocabularies as static RDF Turtle files in the git repository in individual directories and files. This structure will provide easy navigation and maintenance using a traditional software engineering practice with version control systems. Tests in the form of SHACL shapes and Python scripts will automatically run on each Pull Request made to the repository. Each Pull Request will provide an opportunity for each team member to review the changes before merging into the main branch. Any issues related to the vocabularies should be documented as a GitHub Issue.
GitHub Actions (CI/CD) will run tests on each Pull Request. On Each GitHub Release, GitHub Actions will automatically deploy the state of the vocabularies to TERN’s GraphDB and ARDC’s Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA). Versioning will adhere to semver for both GitHub releases and also releases to RVA.