Re: Suggestion on ISSUE-7 in "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web": Allow metadata in any RDF-enabled format

Hi David,

Thanks for raising this. I think that there’s a distinction between the metadata about the dataset (eg its author, when it was published) being mappable to RDF and the standardised format of the metadata document that provides annotations about CSV files being in an RDF format.

Being able to map CSVs and metadata about CSVs into RDF is very much part of what the Working Group needs to do, and Andy and Gregg are taking that work forward at the moment. That is what the charter is referring to when it says "It should also be possible to encode this metadata in RDF”.

Regarding the format of the metadata document: being able to use CSV for that document is exactly where my thinking is going as well. As you say, it means that it can be mapped to other formats if required. I think it also makes the creation of the metadata/schema accessible to non-developers, which is a good thing to achieve if we can manage it.

A generic format would be something like:

about,property,value,type or language
,name,Example,
,author,Jeni Tennison,
,created,2014-04-06,date
col=1,name,Name,en
col=1,name,Nom,fr
col=1,required,true,boolean
...

A more specific format would need to look something like:

row,col,name@en,name@fr,description@en,description@fr,required,type,lang
,,Example,,,,
,1,Name,Nom,Someone’s name.,,true,string,en
,2,Email,,Someone’s email.,true,URL,

which is messy for handling things like multiple languages, which are moderately likely within schemas.

Curious what other people think of this approach.

Jeni

------------------------------------------------------
From: David Booth david@dbooth.org
Reply: David Booth david@dbooth.org
Date: 6 April 2014 at 14:58:19
To: public-csv-wg@w3.org public-csv-wg@w3.org, Jeni Tennison jeni@jenitennison.com, 'Gregg Kellogg' gregg@greggkellogg.com
Subject:  Suggestion on ISSUE-7 in "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web": Allow metadata in any RDF-enabled format

> http://w3c.github.io/csvw/syntax/#h_issue_7
> says:
> [[
> Issue 7
>  
> Used a suffix on filenames to find metadata about them, though we
> haven't decided what format metadata documents should be in, or even if
> they should be conneg'd.
> ]]
>  
> The WG charter says that the metadata "should be defined, or should have
> an encoding, in standard RDF". One possibility would be to allow a
> related metadata document to be in any RDF-enabled format -- including
> CSV+. If a metadata document were supplied in CSV+ format, then it
> could be converted to RDF according to the same mapping rules as any
> other CSV+ document. This of course is recursive, but in practice the
> recursion would likely involve only one or two steps.
>  
> David
>  
>  
>  

--  
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Monday, 7 April 2014 00:10:12 UTC