Re: Data Package RFCs coming up ...

> On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:02 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock@okfn.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I wanted to flag that the Data Package suite of "proposals" which includes:
> 
> - Data Package - http://dataprotocols.org/data-package/ <http://dataprotocols.org/data-package/>
> - JSON Table Schema - http://dataprotocols.org/json-table-schema/ <http://dataprotocols.org/json-table-schema/>
> - Tabular Data Package - http://dataprotocols.org/tabular-data-package/ <http://dataprotocols.org/tabular-data-package/>
> 
> Are being readied for submission as IETF RFC's. 
> 
> Folks on this list are no doubt very familiar with these as they formed a basis for the initial CSV spec here (especially tabular data package).
> 
> We have long planned to do this and have been waiting for the specs to mature - especially actual implementations to exist - to submit as proper RFCs and over the last year or so we've felt we're nearing that point and so this should happen very soon.
> 
> I wanted to flag now especially if there were any specific alignment that could be done that would be great to do now - i know I have flagged some issues on the dataprotocols tracker over the last year on this.

Couple of things I noted looking through:

* The Dialect Description Format is similar to, but not the same as our dialect description. In addition to the version property (csvddfVersion), you have a caseSensitiveHeader, which CSVM lacks.
* The data package calls for a descriptor named datapackage.json, which references a JSON descriptor which seems functionally equivalent to ours, but different. Were they to converge, this could be a reason to use the .well-known/csvm to identify it were it not contained within a package; adding .well-known/csvm with “/databackage.json” as the only pattern would be consistent with how we define lookup.
* Many of the properties included in the datapackage, if namespaced, would work fine as common properties.
* the “resources” property of a datapackage seems to be functionally equivalent to our “tables” property for a TableGroup.

There are more congruencies between the metadata formats, but they aren’t subsets of one or the other. It might be interesting if a future version of datapackages were more closely related to the CSVW metadata format.

> Regards,
> 
> Rufus
> -- 
> Rufus Pollock
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