Re: dwbp-ACTION-123: Call for comments

Thanks for writing up a nice introduction to metadata. I really like that you addressed the issues of different granularity and different types. We may not even need to include the term as something readers need to be familiar with in advance. In general, I like the idea of defining terms where they are first used in the text. I tend to think we should consider both technical people and their managers when determining what level of technicality to write to, so that someone charged with publishing data on the web can easily point a senior decision-maker to specific best practices in order to get buy-in.

Because we are really targeting publishers of data, I think the first few sentences are unnecessary. You could start with the sentence, “Metadata is data about data.” That nicely clues the reader to the fact that this is an introduction that will explain what metadata is.

I don’t understand why there is a paragraph about distribution formats included here. Not only is it out of scope, it seems largely off topic.

I think we should have here some explicit best practices that are about metadata more generally than specific fields, like “metadata should be available in human readable and machine-readable forms”. That is a best practice in itself, so I think it should get more than just a mention in the introduction.

The organization of the numbered sections is confusing to me. The last sentence of the intro suggests that the data licenses and other sections below are subsections of metadata, but the numbers indicate otherwise, and it’s not at all clear where the metadata section is meant to end. There is also an allusion to an introduction for a “data organization” subsection that seems to be between the metadata level and the examples of metadata.

In a larger issue, probably not something we can address in the current draft, I’m not sure that the data lifecycle-based document structure is very helpful in terms of finding a specific best practice. I’m finding it difficult to guess where things are. In a way, everything should fit under the rubric of best practices for data publication. 

-Annette


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Annette Greiner
NERSC Data and Analytics Services
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
510-495-2935

On Dec 5, 2014, at 9:38 AM, Laufer <laufer@globo.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I wrote a description for the beginning of the metadata section and I want to ask the group to comment:
> 
> http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#metadata
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Cheers,
> Laufer
> 
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