Dear all, On behalf of the Linked Art consortium, I would like to propose that the labels for E22 Man-Made Object, E25 Man-Made Feature and E71 Man-Made Thing be changed to drop the unnecessarily gendered “Man-“. In this day and age, I think we should recognize that inclusion and diversity are core features of community acceptance, and that including gender-biased language is alienating.
Thus the proposal is: E22’s label should be changed to Made Object, E25 changed to Made Feature and E71 changed to Made Thing. The “human” nature of the agent that does the making is explicit in the ontology, in that only humans or groups there-of can be Actors and carry out Productions or Creations, so there is no ambiguity about non-humans making these. This issue was discussed at length, and has been open in our profile’s tracker for 12 months now. We would greatly prefer that it be solved by changing the labels in the documentation, and thereby in the RDFS, rather than other RDF specific approaches such as minting new terms and using owl:sameAs to assert equality, or rebranding only in the JSON-LD serialization but persisting in other serializations. The change is consistent, reduces the length of the class names, and is an easy substitution. The comprehensibility of the label is still the same. Given the renaming of Collection to Curated Holding, migration of existing data has the same solution - just substitute the labels. As a second choice, if the above is not acceptable, we propose to instead replace “Man-“ with “Human-“ … only two additional characters, but a bit more of a mouthful. Many thanks for your engagement with this issue! Rob
