RE: W3C Profiles Ontology First Public Working Draft - comments sought - ARDC

Dear Melanie,

Quite some time ago (February) you provided comments on some of the profiling work done by the Dataset Exchange working Group (DXWG). Close to the time, we provided some initial feedback on the request and lodged it on our public mailing list:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-dxwg-comments/2019Feb/0004.html

From that lodgement email, you can see we created two GitHub Issues to track any further work on your comments:

1. https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/753 - Demonstrate a client getting a resource by profile characteristic
2. https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/754 - Find from a profile description, uris of online resources available to convert it to another profile

For 1. You stated:
I'm not sure whether this is possible with the current design, but it may be useful for clients to be able to 'get resource by profile' by a characteristic of the profile - for example, the more recently updated, or the fully/most compliant, or which uses a particular vocabulary, or something else maybe? This is for systems that can use more than one profile and are looking for the richest - where a resource is described in multiple profiles, but these are not dynamically updated from the authoritative source, or where particular vocabularies are of interest; a kind of helper-method to prevent the client having to go through each profile one by one to determine this? Characteristics could be listed in order of preference as profile uri can be.

Here I'll break down the statement into parts for answering:

1.a. it may be useful for clients to be able to 'get resource by profile' by a characteristic of the profile
Currently the Content Negoiation by Profile specification "Conneg" (https://w3c.github.io/dxwg/conneg-by-ap/) only supports getting a resource conforming to a profile by identifying that profile (by URI or token). You may also specify a preference order list of profile identifiers. It would be a ask outside Conneg to determine which profile you wanted to retrieve resources conforming to.

The Profiles Vocabulary (PROF: https://raw.githack.com/w3c/dxwg/prof-3PWD-candidate/prof/) could be used to create a catalogue of profiles which could then be used to discover a profile meeting a particular characteristic of interest.

1.b. Characteristics could be listed in order of preference as profile uri can be.
So following on from the points above: you would need to determine the order or profiles using PROF or other cataloguing and then submit the preference order identifier set to the Conneg server for response via 'get resource by profile'


For 2.: You stated:
If a resource is available in a profile that we don't usually deal with, can we find from the profile's description, uris of online resources available to convert it to another base schema? For example, a resource is available in GA Profile but our system likes to interpret DCAT - can we find in the profile description (i.e. does the ontology include this?) a uri to a tool that converts from GA Profile to DCAT, and if that's not available, seek the base schema of the GA Profile (ISO19115-3) and from it, discovery a uri to a tool that converts from ISO19115-3 to DCAT (or many of them, each with their own metadata so that we can understand who created them and more).

The original answer to your question is given in the public email and the Issue, I summarise:

Q: If a resource is available in a profile that we don't usually deal with, can we find from the profile's description, uris of online resources available to convert it to another base schema?
A: Yes. PROF allows for role descriptions of profile resources so you could indicate a resource to be used for conversions. Currently no role is specified in PROF's starting point role list (see https://raw.githack.com/w3c/dxwg/prof-3PWD-candidate/prof/index.html#resource-roles-vocab) but this role list could and should be extended by particular communities.

An example SPARQL query was provided in the response for:

Profile A - hasResource (role = transformFrom) R
Profile B - hasResource (role = transformTo) R
ie. to find an XSLT 

Select ?xsltfile
WHERE {
 ?p1 prof:hasResource ?r1 .
 ?r1 prof:hasRole myns:transformFrom ?p2 .
 ?r1 prof:hasArtifact ?xsltfile .
 ?r1 dct:conformsTo <uri of XSLT spec> .
 ?p2 prof:hasResource ?r2 . 
 ?r2 prof:hasRole myns:transformTo ?p1 .
 ?r2 prof:hasArtifact ?xsltfile .
}


If you would like more feedback on these Issues, or if you have any further comments on the considerably updated specifications (https://w3c.github.io/dxwg/conneg-by-ap/ - Conneg latest, https://raw.githack.com/w3c/dxwg/prof-3PWD-candidate/prof/ - PROF latest) please do either reply to this or send new messages to the public mailing list. 

If you are happy with the responses, please could you respond also to say so as we'd like to indicate reception of responses.

Thanks,

Nicholas Car & Rob Atkinson
Editors of the Profiles Vocabulary
On behalf of the Dataset Exchange Working Group

Received on Tuesday, 3 September 2019 15:18:57 UTC