Use of dct:hasVersion property in EARL 1.0 WDs

Hello,

Thank you for circulating the EARL Working Drafts. 

I have one minor comment about the use of a Dublin Core property, which I think affects two of the documents:

* Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema - Last Call Working Draft
  http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10-Schema/ 

* Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Guide - First Public Working Draft
  http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10-Guide/

I notice that a number of examples use the property dct:hasVersion ( http://purl.org/dc/terms/hasVersion ) to provide a "version number" as literal value e.g. example 3.5 in 

http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10-Guide/#report-comp

And also in 

http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10-Schema/#reports

there's a constraint/rule that says:

"Every Software must have exactly one title (referenced by dct:title), and should have exactly one version number (referenced by dct:hasVersion) and at least one homepage (referenced by foaf:homepage)"

I don't think this is an appropriate use of that property. The definition provided by DCMI is

"A related resource that is a version, edition, or adaptation of the described resource."

i.e. the intended use of the dct:hasVersion property is not to express the relationship between a "thing" and a "version number", but rather to express a "version" relationship between two "things" (e.g. document-A has-version document-B, and so on) 

And the "note" in the description of the property here

http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-hasVersion 

explains that the use of literal values is not intended.

DCMI doesn't currently provide a property for expressing the relationship between a thing (document, whatever) and a (literal) version number.

Regards,

Pete
---
Pete Johnston
Technical Researcher, Eduserv
pete.johnston@eduserv.org.uk 
+44 (0)1225 474323
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research/people/petejohnston/
http://efoundations.typepad.com/

Received on Tuesday, 3 November 2009 16:10:17 UTC