- From: Xueyuan Jia <xueyuan@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2016 21:59:12 +0800
- To: public-new-work@w3.org
Hello,
W3C is pleased to announce the workshop:
Smart Descriptions & Smarter Vocabularies (SDSVoc) Workshop
30 November - 1 December 2016, Amsterdam.
https://www.w3.org/2016/11/sdsvoc/
The event is hosted by CWI and organized in conjunction with the EU
funded project VRE4EIC (http://www.vre4eic.eu)
The need to describe data with metadata is well understood: the problem
is how best to do it. There are many answers to that question which in
itself creates a further problem: with so many standards to choose from,
which one should I use to describe my data? With so many is use, which
one(s) should I build my application to look for?
The Data Catalog Vocabulary, DCAT, became a W3C Recommendation in
January 2014. Making use of Dublin Core wherever possible, DCAT captures
many essential features of a description of a dataset: the abstract
concepts of the catalog and datasets, the realizable distributions of
the datasets, keywords, landing pages, links to licenses, publishers
etc. But it's clear that DCAT is not a full solution. For example, it
doesn't cover versioning or time and space slices; it describes
datasets, not APIs and so on. Other well-established and widely used
schemas for describing data include CKAN's native schema, schema.org,
DDI, SDMX, CERIF, INSPIRE and the Healthcare and Life Sciences Interest
Group's Dataset Description vocabulary.
This variety presents a barrier to interoperability for many
applications including the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) under
development within the VRE4EIC project. An application may be able to
handle specific metadata schemes or, more precisely, specific profiles
of metadata schemes with predefined lists of allowed values, mandatory
and optional properties etc. The European Commission, for example, has
published a set of application profiles of DCAT that it recommends for
communication with European data portals. This suggests a need for
metadata publishers and consuming applications to be able to specify
which metadata schemes are supported in a machine readable way and to
validate data against such as scheme. This is orthogonal to whether the
data is provided in JSON, RDF or XML.
A further problem in this space is vocabulary management. All the
metadata vocabularies and profiles cited above are subject to different
change management regimes. What is the right balance between being
responsive to the community but stable enough to ensure trust in the
vocabulary?
Workshop aims
This workshop aims to clarify the steps needed to improve communication
between data repositories and applications that use that data, such as
virtual research environments. Applications may simply discover data or
visualize it, manipulate it, discuss it, correct it, describe it
republish it etc. The outcome /may/ be a new W3C Working Group chartered
to extend DCAT and determine how human and machine-readable metadata
profiles are defined and made discoverable. A further aim is to explore
how W3C can best support vocabulary development for a variety of
communities.
Workshop topics
* Approaches to dataset descriptions
* Experience of using DCAT and/or other dataset description vocabularies
* Defining and using metadata profiles
* Discovering metadata profiles
* Providing and using metadata in multiple profiles for multiple contexts
* Experiences of developing, managing and mapping vocabularies.
For more on the workshop please see the workshop details and submission
instructions:
https://www.w3.org/2016/11/sdsvoc/
The event is open to all, subject to registration and the capacity of
the venue. Position statements will be required to secure a speaking
slot, due by 9 October.
If you have any questions, please contact organizer Phil Archer
<phila@w3.org>, Data Activity Lead.
We look forward to seeing you there.
For Phil Archer, Data Activity Lead,
Xueyuan Jia, W3C Marketing & Communications
Received on Friday, 17 June 2016 13:59:24 UTC