RE: Meta -> data use case/API

Gregg, Phil.

Thanks for starting this thread. I think this is an important case to cover (& currently absent) ... I have two angles in mind that might be worth pursuing for a usecase

#1: there is a considerable amount of CSV already published, such as on open data portals like data.gov.uk; the majority of this is not annotated and is unlikely to be until the publishers "get around" to retrofit the data with metadata annotations. In the real world, this could be never. Therefore, it is important that third parties can add the annotation to complement data for which they are not the publisher. UC #17 "Canonical mapping of CSV" <http://w3c.github.io/csvw/use-cases-and-requirements/#UC-CanonicalMappingOfCSV> already states "there is nothing stopping a data publisher from adding annotation defining data semantics once, say, an appropriate de facto standard vocabulary has been agreed within the community of use", so this might provide a hook for incorporating the "metadata refers to data published by a third party" requirement.

#2: I came across standards initiative in the Open Geospatial Consortium (SensorThings API), as yet incomplete, that uses the OData protocol to publish observations as datastreams from internet connected sensors (in the theme of Internet of Things). I'll dig a bit further to see if this offers a use case for us to annotate data made available via the OData protocol (at the moment, it looks quite json centric and does not appear to offer a CSV encoding).

Gregg's idea about annotating a html table published by a 3rd party might be simpler to communicate :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Gregg Kellogg [mailto:gregg@greggkellogg.net] 
Sent: 02 April 2014 16:37
To: Phil Archer
Cc: Tandy, Jeremy; public-csv-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Meta -> data use case/API

On Apr 2, 2014, at 7:43 AM, Phil Archer <phila@w3.org> wrote:

> Jeremy,
> 
> Picking up on your +1 to my mention of a use case where person B creates metadata about data published by person A, I'm happy to write the use case(s) but do you have one in mind that you can point me to? As well as this general case, it should also cover metadata for a query to an API (potentially including OData), i.e. anything that comes back from a URL that looks a bit like a table. It's the link *from* the metadata *to* the data that I'm most anxious to see covered.

It seems to me that allowing the metadata to reference the data source should be fairly straightforward. The case where this is a URL would seem to cover this, and we would want to provide guidance on content-negotiation for this. We also need to provide some enumeration of specific supported types (text/csv, text/tsv). It might be interesting to consider extracting data from an HTML table identified by a fragment of an HTML document as another supported format.

Gregg

> Phil.
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> Phil Archer
> W3C Data Activity Lead
> http://www.w3.org/2013/data/
> 
> http://philarcher.org
> +44 (0)7887 767755
> @philarcher1
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2014 20:24:01 UTC