Re: Invitation for public review of DCAT-AP

Hi Makx, everyone,

Over the summer I've read the doc. It's very interesting, and a much welcome initiative. In general it looks technically right. But I have to say that I couldn't do a very thorough reading, as I lacked the time for it (the AP really covers a lot of ground!)

In fact my questions are mostly about licenses. I am working in an effort about rights statements for the cultural sector [0], and thus interested in this a lot. Two of the related work we've checked are ODRS [1] and ODRL [2]. We are not going to re-use as one or the other fully, but we re-use a lot of their patterns. So I specifically focused on possible discrepancies between DCAT-AP and them (actually in the case of DCAT-AP, ODRL is perhaps less relevant).

- apparently Distributions can have a dct:license, but not Datasets. It is on purpose?

- why can a Distribution have a general dct:rights, but Dataset can have only an (arguably more specific) dct:accessRights?

- I'm a bit surprised not to find any relationships between License Documents and Rights Statements. I'd expect some guidelines to use them in coordination. Or is it that they can be completely independent, or one is used when the other cannot?

- dct:type on dct:LicenseDocument seem intended to capture many licensing aspects: permissions and duties like "royalties required" (which ODRL has a very complex model for) as well as types of licenses (e.g. public domain, for which ODRS uses a subclass of LicenseDocument). And dct:type on dct:LicenseDocument could be expected to about about something quite different, i.e. the "type of a document".


I have some remarks on non-license topics, too.

- I don't understand the intention behind specifying Literal and Resource as Mandatory classes (3.1). I expect these will never occur as direct (explicit) types for resources appearing in DCAT-AP graphs (of course they can be infered from the asserted statements, but that's different...).

- It's great to see a concrete proposal for frequency of updates (i.e how to use dct:accrualPerdiodicity/dct:Frequency), i.e. the vocabulary of frequencies at [3]. But in the corresponding SKOS file [4], the frequencies are only typed as SKOS concepts, not as dct:Frequency. Actually I don't really bother, but I know some people will notice and may be reluctant to use these resources.

- How will dct:language be used in practice? In the reference document, it is said to be expected with instances of dct:LinguisticSystem. Are the ISO 639 standard codes falling in scope of this class? In practice, I expect that dct:language will be used with simple string codes from ISO, like "en" (and I've seen it in a draft implementation guide circulated by Peter Winstanley to our group). But using a literal in places where a string is expected could create issues in the RDF/OWL technological stack. It could just be simpler if no class was formally expected for dct:language.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,
  
Antoine

[0] http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/06/digital-content/dpla-europeana-creative-commons-collaborate-on-international-rights-statements/
[1] http://schema.theodi.org/odrs/
[2] https://www.w3.org/community/odrl/
[3] http://publications.europa.eu/mdr/authority/frequency/
[4] http://publications.europa.eu/mdr/resource/authority/frequency/skos/frequencies-skos.rdf
On 7/4/15 1:12 PM, Makx Dekkers wrote:
> Please find below the invitation for the Public Review of the European DCAT Application Profile. Feedback from this group will be highly appreciated. Makx.
>
> You are kindly invited to review the proposed revision of the DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP). The draft revision can be downloaded from *https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/137964**. *It is available for public review *until the 30**^th **of August 2015.*
>
> Please submit your feedback by sending comments and suggestions to dcat_application_profile@joinup.ec.europa.eu <mailto:dcat_application_profile@joinup.ec.europa.eu>. The feedback received will be discussed by the DCAT-AP Revision Working Group in late August and early September. Final publication of the revised Application Profile is foreseen for September 2015.
>
> The DCAT-AP is a specification based on the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) of W3C, which is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogues published on the Web. In the Application Profile, additional classes and properties from other well-known vocabularies have been re-used where necessary. The basic use case of the DCAT-AP is to enable aggregation of and search for datasets across data portals in Europe, thus making it easier to find public sector datasets across borders and sectors.
>
> The DCAT-AP has been developed in the context of Action 1.1 – Improving semantic interoperability in European eGovernment systems of the European Commission’s Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) programme. The DCAT-AP is a joint initiative of two Directorates-General**of the European Commission, DG DIGIT (ISA Programme) and DG CONNECT, together with the Publications Officeof the EU. The Publications Office chairs the DCAT-AP Revision Working Group.
>
> Looking forward to receiving your feedback.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> The ISA Secretariat
>

Received on Sunday, 30 August 2015 17:24:04 UTC