Contribution Guide

DPV Contribution Guide

Contribution / Participation

The DPVCG is the primary forum for contributions and participations regarding the DPV. As such, all decisions and resolutions will be conducted through the group's meetings and call. Membership in DPVCG is not necessary to contribute to DPV, but is recommended for participating in the group's decision making process. Contributions and questions can be sent to the group's public mailing list or expressed as GitHub issues.

Suggesting new terms

To suggest a new term, we request following information:

Please ensure the terms follow the style guides

• term
• description of the term
• whether it should be a class or a property
• relation to existing term(s) in DPV e.g. through sub-classes
• source (where applicable)
• justification or relevance of why this term should be added (where not obvious)

Suggestions are welcome via the group's meetings, mailing list, and GitHub issues.

Raising issues

Before submitting an issue, please see the whether the issue has been addressed on GitHub. If not, please raise the issue via the group's public mailing list or expressed as GitHub issues.

Fixes, corrections to the terms are considered as issues and can be submitted similarly. For minor changes, we may prefer to incorporate them directly rather than through pull requests and patches. For larger issues, please check with the group before submitting a pull-request to ensure its appropriate and efficient incorporation.

Development Guide

(1) DO NOT change the outputs (HTML, RDF) directly - they are autogenerated from a different set of inputs

(2) DO NOT make changes over the main branch - use the dev branch to make changes or raise PRs

The development and maintainence of DPV takes place primarily through shared spreadsheets (see documentation-generator/vocab_csv folder). The terms and their annotated metadata are declared in the spreadsheet, and used as input to generate the RDF files and HTML documentation through the documentation-generator tooling. The documentation tool is a collection of Python scripts to assist in the automation of downloading the spreadsheet as CSV files, generating RDF files, validating them for correctness, and producing the HTML documentation.

Therefore, whenever adding a new term or changing existing ones, the following steps are recommended to update the DPV vocabulary and documentation:

1. Make changes appropriately in the shared spreadsheet. The links to this are available to the DPVCG members. For others, please see the CSV files in documentation_generator/vocab_csv. Ideally, create an GitHub issue for discussions and follow ups.
2. Use the documentation-generator tooling to download the spreadsheet, generate RDF, test it, generate HTML output.
3. Manually inspect whether the changes have been made. Tools, scripts, and software in general can propogate errors silently.
4. The variables and parameters in documentation-generator tooling can be used to define the path where files are exported to can be set to the dpv repository to make changes in this directory. For e.g. EXPORT_DPV_HTML_PATH = ~/code/dpvcg/dpv will generate the HTML documentation in the dpv directory.
5. Submit a pull-request for merging with the repository.

Getting help and assistance

If you're unsure about something, or would like clarifications, or suggestions - please communicate with us or open an issue. We would be happy to help.