Re: [BP - MET] - Best Practices - Guidance on the Provision of Metadata

Hi Bernardette,

Thank you for the paper.

I did not consider data catalogues as data brokers. What I said is that a
Broker is one that holds the data catalogue and could help a Consumer to
find data published by a Publisher. The terminology Consumer, Publisher and
Broker could have different understandings and at some point we will need
to define terms and have a common definition.

I saw the roles of the Open Data Ecosystem that are presented in the paper,
but I have restricted my first analyzes to two main tasks (searching data
and using data) and the metadata that could help these two tasks. If we
consider all the roles probably we will have to define more possible tasks
and all the metadata related to help them.

Let me give an analogous example (outside Open Data). Let's imagine that a
Consumer wants to buy a mobile phone at BestBuy. They have a catalogue of
products with metadata that could be used by the Consumer to find the item
that she likes. BestBuy is a Broker in this sense. For buying she could
analyze the technical features, price, shipping rates, returns and
replacements, etc. After buying and receiving the phone, the Consumer would
need another set of metadata that contains information about how to, for
example, configuring date and hour, how to effectively use the phone, the
semantics of the appliance. In this example, Google could be considered as
a Broker too, using semantic information embedded in BestBuy pages to build
"Google's catalogue", with a subset of the whole metadata.

I think we have the same two tasks when a Consumer wants to consume data
and that we have specific metadata for these two tasks.

All of these is an initial discussion and DCAT seems to be the natural
initial step. But I think that most of the concepts are sometimes very
biases through CKAN approach.

Best,
Laufer


2014-05-15 16:22 GMT-03:00 Bernadette Farias Lóscio <bfl@cin.ufpe.br>:

> Hi Laufer,
>
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
>
> I am not sure if we should consider data catalogues as data brokers. A
> data catalogue is just a tool that helps data publication and data access,
> and both data providers and data consumers may use this tool.
>
> Concerning the classification of metadata, I suggest to think in terms of
> datasets and distributions, as described in DCAT and proposed by Makx.
>
> Since you mentioned Open Data Ecosystem, I'm sending a paper that I wrote
> together with a colleague about this subject. The paper considers Open Data
> as a Service, but it also describes and idea about Open Data Ecosystem.
>
> kind regards,
> Bernadette
>
>
>
>
> 2014-05-15 11:35 GMT-03:00 Laufer <laufer@globo.com>:
>
>  Hi Bernadette, Carlos, Makx, all DWBP members,
>>
>>
>>
>> I created a page on the wiki, "Best Practices – Guidance on the Provision
>> of Metadata", where we can put the information about this topic. I took the
>> liberty to define a prefix in the subject of the e-mails related to these
>> discussions: [BP- MET].
>>
>>
>>
>> I would like to expose some thoughts that I think are related to the data
>> on the web ecosystem. I see a kind of data architecture that has three big
>> roles: a data Publisher, a data Consumer and a data Broker. The Broker is
>> the one that has information that can be used by the Consumer to find data
>> published by the Publisher.
>>
>>
>>
>> As an example of Brokers we can think about implementations of CKAN, used
>> by data.gov, dados.gov.br, etc. CKAN has metadata (provided by
>> Publishers) that are useful for Consumers to find data. CKAN is a registry
>> and can also be a repository for the data to be consumed. Almost all use
>> cases of DWBP WG are examples of Brokers.
>>
>>
>>
>> At the same time, data published in CKAN implementations can have
>> multiple formats, as CSV, for example. Once a Consumer chooses some data to
>> use from a Publisher, she needs another kind of metadata to understand how
>> to access the data and its semantics.
>>
>>
>>
>> I propose to create categories and types of metadata. I see two
>> categories: metadata for search and metadata for use. Each of these
>> categories would have types of metadata. For example:
>>
>>
>>
>> Metadata Types for Search
>>
>> Human Content Description (free text)
>>
>> Machine Content Description (vocabularies)
>>
>> Provenance
>>
>> License
>>
>> Revenue
>>
>> Credentials
>>
>> Quality / Metrics
>>
>> Release Schedule
>>
>> Data Format
>>
>> Data Access
>>
>>
>>
>> Metadata Types for Use
>>
>> URI Design Principles
>>
>> Machine Access to Data
>>
>> API specification
>>
>> Format Specification
>>
>>
>>
>> The Brokers itself have another kind of metadata about its own
>> information.
>>
>>
>> Maybe in the future a Consumer will search for data no more in these
>> Brokers (with its catalogues) but they will use search engines that could
>> obtain the metadata (both the search and the use) using its crawlers. But
>> now, we have this heterogeneous world of data that is one of the
>> characteristic of the web since its beginning.
>>
>>
>>
>> Contributions of all members of the DWBP WG will be appreciated.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> Laufer
>>
>> --
>> .  .  .  .. .  .
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Bernadette Farias Lóscio
> Centro de Informática
> Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>



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