Re: [dxwg] Use of dct:type with both Class and Concept

@kcoyle wrote - 
> the fact that some communities are still using controlled term lists rather than classes ...
> ... don't use lists from outdated metadata practices; ...

Karen - not sure which world you are living in, but it sounds like a very enlightened and privileged one. 
Back in the one where I spend my days it is hard enough getting term-vocabularies published on the web at all, so IMHO SKOS is realistically all we can hope for. In fact, you can get a long way with SKOS++ and there is significant innovation in this space - look at QUDT for example where all the key classes are sub-classes of skos:Concept, so individual classifiers are all individual skos:Concepts. And look at the NERC Vocabulary Service which has about 40,000 skos:Concepts and is used widely in the earth and environmental sciences. Now I agree that not all of these would be used as high-level classifiers in the dct:type slot, but some of them would. 

Overall, if we disallow the use of SKOS for classification vocabularies I believe we consign DCAT to oblivion. 

I also think it is big mistake to propose minting our own sets of term-lists where respectable authorities have already published lists with a URI-per-term. The fact that they are sometimes not described according to perfect DL-conformant OWL is much less important than the fact that an important authority (like LoC) is providing an important service to the linked data community by carrying over their legacy of analysis into a more modern platform. And we don't take on an additional maintenance burden. 

Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of "good-enough" - actually more like "really quite good given the level of organizational engagement and community acceptance". 

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by dr-shorthair
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/314#issuecomment-416768509 using your GitHub account

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2018 23:04:05 UTC