Closure, registries and ADMS

This is to explain and expand on my question on "closure" in ADMS.

First some context ...

I've been working [1] with a few groups [2] who feel the need for some 
(preferably standardized) notion of Linked Data Registry as a way to 
improve governance and interoperability in their use of Linked Data.

Such registries would need to record things like ontologies, code lists, 
reference URI sets and datasets.

There are a lot of important differences between a *registry* and a 
*repository* including:

(a) A registry records that some asset exists but the asset itself may 
be served from elsewhere.

(b) A registry can state the disposition of the register owner to that 
asset. So things like "status" may differ for the same asset in 
different registers. One register owner might think an asset is ready 
for widespread use, another might not.

(c) A registry can definitively enumerate the set of things in a 
particular collection (which we'll call a "register"). It can in effect 
state "these and only these ontologies are approved for use in this 
context" or "these and only these codes are in this code list, using 
anything else would violate the schema".

Operationally a registry has some controlled approval process to make 
(b) and (c) work. So while a "register" is, at some level, just a list 
it is a list that makes promises about the status of its content. That 
as much about governance and promise as it is about technical notions of 
closure.

Most of the people I work with in this area have a geospatial 
background, and thus are familiar with OGC and ISO specs of which there 
are a lot that are relevant here.  In particular, a default expectation 
would be a linked data vocabulary for registries which broadly 
corresponds with  ISO 19135 (Geographic information -- Procedures for 
item registration).

BTW This is also the context behind my questions on "Representation 
Technique" since all of these groups want to "represent" a single 
concept via a range of representation languages including non-RDF ones 
like UML and XSD.

... end context.

So a key question for me is whether ADMS, which doesn't claim to support 
semantic asset registries only semantic asset *repositories* is a 
possible match to this need and something to build on. Or not.

If the requirements I'm seeing from these groups are representative of 
other public sector organizations then this will be a question for GLD 
in how it decides to proceed with ADMS.

Looking at my list above then (a) seems fine, (b) may just require some 
improved description of adms:status (or more likely an extension), (c) 
is currently not supported at all.

So with this context my question translates to:

"""
Do we see Semantic Registries as a use case for ADMS and so wish to 
extend/modify it to fit (possibly based on lessons from the existing 
standards) or is that out of scope?
"""

Dave

[1] Full disclosure some of this work is being commercially funded.

[2] In the interests of transparency these include the UK Location 
Programme (who lead UK's response to the EU INSPIRE directive), UKGovLD 
(who have a coordination role in UK government use of linked data) and 
some groups in CSIRO (who in turn are working with UN agencies). I do 
not speak for any of these groups, this discussion is simply informed by 
my interactions with them and any errors here are my own.

Received on Friday, 19 October 2012 11:36:03 UTC