Bug 014: earl:Software is Unclear

This is feedback on a Last Call Working Draft:

Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema
W3C Working Draft 10 May 2011
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-EARL10-Schema-20110510/

This feedback is specifically about ยง 2.8. Software Class:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-EARL10-Schema-20110510/#Software

It is unclear where this class fits into the model. This prose,
specifically, is unclear:

"It can be used to describe an Assertor, such as a validation or other
quality assurance tool, and it can be used to describe a Test Subject"

What does it mean to "describe" an Assertor? What is meant, it seems,
is in fact that Software is a subclass of the union of Assertor and
TestSubject. In other words, any instance which is a member of
earl:Software is also a member of either earl:Assertor or
earl:TestSubject.

But this is not entirely clear, and the example given (Example 13)
doesn't show an earl:Software instance being used in the object
position, only the subject position, so we can't see which vertices
come into it, enabling us to infer type information from the range of
the vertex property used.

This bug relates to Bug 001, but earl:Software does occupy a unique
position in the vocabulary in terms of it being usable as the range of
two different properties. This has to be explained, then, with some
care. Diagrammatical representation should be available and more
examples, as stated in Bug 001, but there may also need to be more in
the way of textual explanation too.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Wednesday, 11 May 2011 12:21:36 UTC