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

Great answer, thank you!

-----Original Message-----
From: John Erickson [mailto:olyerickson@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 9:20 AM
To: Brand Niemann
Cc: public-gld-comments@w3.org
Subject: 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 14:57:35 UTC