Re: Use machine-readable standardized data formats / Use non-proprietary data formats

hello all.

On 2015-08-14 20:50, Laufer wrote:
> If we have BPs that orient publishers to provide metadata about
> structure, license, etc., to provide version information, and a lot of
> other BPs, why we have to explain what data is ruled out or ruled in?
> Why we have to forbid some publishers of following our BPs?

thanks for this, laufer, that was exactly what i was thinking when 
reading annette's email. what's the problem with legislation documents, 
if all the BP talks about is how to represent them well in a webby way 
as part of a legislative dataset? all the BP should talk about are the 
webby parts, so it can safely stay away from any issues that pertain to 
a specific aspect of the data that's not specifically about being webby.

starting from https://github.com/dret/webdata, let's see how you could 
talk about webby legislative documents:

1: Linkable

publish all your documents at stable URIs, so that they can be 
referenced. at the very least, give them unique and stable URIs, if you 
don't want to make them directly accessible.

for legislation, fragments (any news about this from the group, btw?) 
would be very essential, so that references can not just refer to 
documents, but all relevant parts of it.

but again, reference culture in legislation is complex and hard, but 
they should think about the things they want to reference (as resources 
and sub-resources), and make sure all of those get stable identifiers. 
the BP would simply tell them *to do it*, not *how to do it* for their 
particular scenario.

2: Parseable

probably use XML which is a good foundation for document-ish content. if 
you better like SGML or whatever floats your boat, that's fine, too.

3: Understandable

use or define a documented format for your legal documents. use whatever 
schema language makes you happy (DTD, XSD, RNG, ...), but define and 
document the schema so that people accessing your data know what the XML 
represents.

4: Linked

when cross-referencing legislation (such as a law from a ruling), use 
the URI of the referenced resource so that references are established at 
the web level.

5: Usable

label your document with a license, so that others know how they can use 
it. there are many licenses to choose from, and picking any one of those 
is better than not picking one at all.

so, what's the difficulty in making these recommendations, and maybe 
adding more that's in the BP but not (currently) in web data? BP 
wouldn't have to go out on a limb and try to explain how to design an 
XML schema, that's a different issue. so why exclude this scenario?

cheers,

dret.

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erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
            | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
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Received on Saturday, 15 August 2015 01:48:32 UTC