Re: [dxwg] DataService and DataDistributionService (#432)

Thanks, @dr-shorthair for giving that a go.
I still think it is difficult to understand the relationship between DataService and DataDistributionService as it is described there in the definitions. Maybe the problem is that we don't come out and say there that a DataDistributionService is a type of DataService, which leaves the reader initially trying to differentiate them since they sound similar. If the reader grasps that DataDistributionService is a type of DataService, then the natural assumption from that point is that a DiscoveryService is the other type of DataService. But, no, it is actually just a specialization of DataDistributionService, though it offers no additional attributes, which makes it seem kind of useless. The description below talks about data transformation services and data processing services, but none of those exists in the vocabulary, so that raises more questions. Why is a discovery service special? After all, it is essentially a DataDistributionService that serves a dataset that is a catalog. 

I suspect that we are having trouble describing these things because the relationships are not quite what's needed. It seems odd to me to have an entity that is a specialization of another entity that is itself a specialization of another entity, where neither of the two lower level entities carries more information than its parent entity. The DataDistributionService has the attribute of servesDataset, but a DiscoveryService serves a dataset, too (a catalog). If we think it is useful to distinguish a discovery service from an API, we need to fill out those distinctions in the vocabulary so that they are functionally different. For my money, the real difference is not the type of dataset but the fact that an API is intended for programmatic use and a discovery service is intended for human use through a user agent. Useful general information about an API along those lines might be the type of API or the location of documentation if it is separate from the root endpoint. But I'm having a hard time thinking of general information about a discovery service that isn't covered by being a resource or a DataService already.

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Received on Saturday, 12 January 2019 02:00:40 UTC