- From: Paul Walk <paul@paulwalk.net>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2019 11:01:23 +0000
- To: public-dxwg-comments@w3.org
I'm hoping that you might get some useful feedback from those in the Dublin Core community who have a much better understanding of this area than I. In the meantime, I'll offer some general comments (these are personal, and are not meant to represent a 'DCMI view'). # General comment 1: I'm glad that this continues to be explored. The Singapore Framework was pioneering in its day, but was probably developed a little too early. The importance of metadata application profiles is now more widely accepted, if not entirely understood, so I think any effort to develop a better understanding of this is valuable. # Diagrams - relationships I find the diagrams quite difficult to understand. I think I'm unclear whether the diagrams represent entity relationships or object-oriented-hierarchies. These seem to be mixed together - for example the relationships between Standard and Profile. I guess it's not necessarily invalid for these to be mixed in this way, but I find it unusual and a little confusing. # Standards Reading the page at: https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/tree/gh-pages/profilesont (BTW - there's a broken link on that page to the "(DXWG)'s Profile Guidance work"). This describes a standard thus: "A Standard can be either a Base Specification (a Standard not profiling any other Standard) or a Profile (a Standard which does profile others)." This is an interesting use of the word 'standard'. I appreciate that we have these imprecise terms, and that we have to arrange them somehow, and that this definition is not necessarily any worse than any other but, nonetheless, I find it a bit surprising. I have tended to view metadata application profiles as being an arrangement of properties and constraints, drawing from one or more namespaces (frequently from more than one namespace in the domains with which I am most familiar), in order to either facilitate some task, or to describe some domain. In this formulation, 'standard' is closer to 'namespace', and so I would expect a many-to-many relationship between standard and profile. # General comment 2: My view, when approaching these things, is always coloured by my main experience which is as a software and systems developer, rather than as an information scientist. So, when I face a new ontology, there is one over-riding question in my mind: Will this help me to do something useful? I haven't had time yet to explore the indicative examples offered on the GitHub site, so the answer to my question may lie in those. From my perspective, the most pressing issues with application profiles are: 1. we don't have a conventional way to document them yet 2. we don't have a conventional way to automatically validate data instances of application profiles (i.e. data which allegedly conforms to the constraints of a given application profile) I'm aware that there are efforts to address these concerns, and this ontology does point to these - especially in the second diagram with the "Resource Roles". However, my initial reaction to the ontology in general is that it is "too much ontology", and that something quite a bit simpler than this might help to position application profiles in a frame which allows us to develop these conventions. I hope that these comments are useful. As I said, I am glad that there is ongoing work to explore this space. thanks for the opportunity to comment, cheers, Paul ------------------------------------------- Paul Walk http://www.paulwalk.net Founder and Director, Antleaf Ltd http://www.antleaf.com Antleaf provides Management Services to DCMI http://www.dublincore.org -------------------------------------------
Received on Friday, 25 January 2019 16:54:43 UTC