Re: DCAT comments - dataset dependecy - http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-vocab-dcat-20130801/

Hello Johan,

Following up on the issue you raised before on DCAT. 

On 15 Aug 2013, at 22:00, Johan De Smedt <johan.de-smedt@tenforce.com> wrote:

> B) For the schema description (i.e. [2] - the formal specification of syntax or semantics going with a data set), I did not find an alternative yet that is better than void:vocabulary.
> Such a property is useful (like but complementary to dcat:mediaType or dct:format) to know if an application can actual process the information referenced by the DCAT.
> Example use case:
> -1- The EU publication has it’s own owl schema.  applications not knowing this schema will have difficulty to process the data.
>   Having the schema:
>   i) published
>   ii) referenced in the dcat:Distribution of a data set published complying to that schema
>   would allow for an application to select the correct data set manifestation to be able to process or render the information.
> -2- Eurostat statiscal information may be published using XML, RDF/XML, csv, html
>   Especially when XML or RDF/XML is used it seems relevant to know which XML or OWL schema is used to know if the data can be processed.

I absolutely agree that having a description of the schema is very useful in many scenarios. However, this problem was considered out the scope of DCAT because of design choice  to have a minimal focused vocabulary and due to the available time/resources. Notice that DCAT makes no assumption about the dataset format or content. As you mentioned in your email, there exists a number of properties that can be used for particular datasets as void:vocabulary and I think there is some efforts in schema.org and elsewhere to describe schema of CSV datasets. However as I mentioned above, given the scope (and the resources) of DCAT, the schema description is not addressed.


Best regards,
Fadi Maali

Received on Friday, 25 October 2013 01:33:55 UTC