Re: Requirements for profiles

On 11/17/17 7:30 AM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
> Hi Karen,
> 
>> Not sure what you mean by "composed."
> 
> Maybe I should have just said "combination",
> but I meant using multiple profiles in conjunction.
> Example:
> – Profile A: "use FOAF to describe people"
> – Profile B: "use Schema.org to describe books"
> 
> When a representation does both of the above,
> then it conforms to both profiles
> and we essentially have a composition of profiles A and B.

Ruben, I think this is a variant view of profiles, so we should discuss
it as a group. The APs that exist today for DCAT are complete
descriptions of all of the elements of a metadata schema. As I read them
they cannot be combined as they are, nor can parts or fragments be
combined as new profiles because they haven't been designed to be
uniformly combinable. That is an interesting interpretation but not one
that we have yet as a requirement.

Your use case appears to assume profiles that each conform to a single
entity description, in one case people in the other case books. However,
a "book" description (as I show here [1] and that is the case for real
book metadata [2]) includes everything needed to describe a book
including information about the people who write them.

If you have profiles that, for example, are metadata descriptions for
books, and they have these characteristics:

1 - FOAF for people, BIBO for books
2 - BIBFRAME for people, schema.org for books

it seems to me unlikely that any combination of them would be workable.

At the same time, having a way to create profiles as "fragments" that
can be combined is an interesting idea, so we should explore that.

kc
[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/profile-guidelines/
[2] http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/docs/index.html

> 
>> conformance to multiple profiles is a function of
>> the service that is determining "conformance". The profiles are
>> essentially inert in that process - they are being acted on.
> 
> Conformance isn't necessarily determined afterwards by a service.
> A server could also just directly generate a conforming representation.
> 
> I'd say that the profile itself defines with conformance means,
> regardless of the way to validate it.
> 
>> What isn't clear to me is the "response" part. What is doing the
>> responding? or what is the nature of this thing called "response"?
> 
> This is in the context of an HTTP request and response.
> A client sends an HTTP request to receive a representation of a resource.
> The server responds with that representation.
> 
> So given a dataset, the server will respond with a representation
> of that dataset that conforms to zero or more profiles.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Ruben
> 

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234 (Signal)
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600

Received on Friday, 17 November 2017 16:56:19 UTC