Re: FW: Last call: Data Catalog (DCAT) and Data Cube vocabularies from W3C Gov Linked Data WG

Brand, thanks for the question. You wrote...

> Hadley, Thank you. Does this deal with the data elements themselves in the
> data sets, so you can search for data elements that you want to integrate
> with other data elements and find their definitions (metadata) to know if
> they are the same or similar enough to be semantically integrated?

No. DCAT deals with the initial problems of where dataset catalogs and
datasets themselves are from and what they contain. Loosely speaking,
it does for catalogs and datasets what Dublin Core did for
publications: it provides a succinct vocabulary that providers can
rely on for describing their datasets, and consumers can rely on for
finding. DCAT has already been used as the basis for the schema.org
"datasets" extension as a way to make discovery of datasets easier
using popular search engines.

Articulating the actual vocabularies used in published datasets is
waaaay beyond the scope of DCAT, in part because DCAT is not
restricted to datasets published as linked data. Some work including
http://healthdata.tw.rpi.edu are looking at ways to communicate
standard vocabularies used in published linked data...

-- 
John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
Director, Web Science Operations
Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
<http://tw.rpi.edu> <olyerickson@gmail.com>
Twitter & Skype: olyerickson

Received on Thursday, 14 March 2013 13:20:25 UTC