Re: [dxwg] Use of "standard" (#792)

@nicholascar thanks for the summary. However, I think we are misunderstanding each other...

I used the word 'validation' at the beginning of this thread, and I would define this in this context as the process by which conformance is evaluated.

I continue to think that validation is an important activity which I would like to see better supported by application profiles, and so it follows logically that I am interested (as you are) in ideas of conformance.

Where (I think) we differ is in the extent to which validation should or could be an entirely unmediated, completely automated process. I especially do not think that it is necessary, or probably even viable, to have a validation process which somehow works down through layers of  "inherited" conformance rules.

My view of the potential power of application profiles is more akin to the "mashup" paradigm of a few years ago, when web services developers largely abandoned a set of formal and highly complex standards (known disparagingly at the time as "WS-*") in favour of reliance on simple standards and formats, and clear conventions in human-readable documentation. The big lesson from these years was that developer-mediated point-point integrations can work just fine, so long as the developer can discover quite easily what technologies and standards are being used to describe and deliver a given set of data or metadata.

Basically, I think that the whole business of inheritance, provenance chaining etc. should be put to one side, in favour of developing a good, understandable and efficient process for describing application profiles and then for validating datasets which are claimed to confirm to an application profile.

I hope I have managed to clarify. As I hope I remembered to say at the outset - this is an opinion rather than a DCMI sanctioned view, but I would point out that the extraordinary breadth of uptake of the DCMI Metadata Terms has in no small part been due to the scope constraints which the original developers set for themselves.

I hope this is useful, even if only a little :-)

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Received on Tuesday, 3 September 2019 16:08:11 UTC