RE: Questions on the url property in Table annotation an on dialect being a core property

Hi Iván,

On Wednesday, December 09, 2015 9:53 AM, Ivan Herman wrote:

> > On 4 Dec 2015, at 12:26, Svensson, Lars <L.Svensson@dnb.de> wrote:
> >
> > Dear all,
> >
> > While reviewing the WG documents (excellent work, large kudoi to the WG!)
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> > and thinking of how we could produce compatible data at our place, I
> stumbled over the url annotation on tables as defined in the metadata
> vocabulary, §5.4 [1]. The specification says that in the table metadata the url
> (URI?) is mandatory and should point to the table the table description
> describes, referring to the definition of url in the tabular data model [2] that
> says that the value of the url might be null.
> >
> > At first sight my reading would be that for each table I describe with a table
> annotation in the metadata document, I MUST have a url property pointing
> from the metadata document to the described table. If so, that would be a
> major implementation obstacle at our place. Our main use case for producing
> tabular data is that customers can go to the catalogue, select a number of
> object descriptions and export those as CSV. When the customer downloads the
> data, we would provide a Link-Header pointing to the metadata document
> describing the CSV format. It would, however, be almost impossible to point
> back from that metadata document to _all_ instances of CSV files ever created
> (particularly since that would also have privacy concerns, since it would be
> possible to see what other customers have downloaded).
> >
> > This boils down to the following question(s):
> >
> > 1) Is my understanding of the use of the url property in the table metadata
> correct?
> > 2) If so, can I solve it by simply setting it to null?
> 
> That is my reading and, I think, that was our intention. If set to null, that means
> that the implementation makes the 'pairing' between the metadata and the
> data itself which, as far as I can see, is exactly what you do.

OK, fine. Then I can start to figure out how to describe our table format.

> >
> > And one further question regarding dialect:
> >
> > The dialect is an optional property in the table description. From my
> understanding, however, the dialect has major impact on the processing of the
> table. In the tabular format definition, core annotations are those that have
> impact on processor behaviour [3]. Does that mean, that dialect should be a
> core annotation or is that solved by defining default values for the dialect?
> 
> First of all, the dialect is optional. Furthermore, the dialect only provides hints;
> the parsing algorithm in the model document[1] is non normative. In other
> words, if your processor produces an annotated data model, that is fine; how
> the processor gets there, so to say, is not something these recommendations
> control…

Ah, OK. I thought the dialect would have much larger impact on the processing.

> I hope this answers your questions!

Absolutely. Thanks!

Best,

Lars

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 2015 19:43:51 UTC