Re: Profile definition

Hi Lars, everyone,

On 14/06/17 09:25, Svensson, Lars wrote:
> Hi Ruben,
>
> On Tuesday, June 13, 2017 8:50 PM, Ruben Verborgh [mailto:Ruben.Verborgh@UGent.be] wrote:
>
>>> We are not talking about DCAP, nor specific profiles of DCAT - we are talking about
>> the _definition of a profile used in DCAP
>>
>> Okay; but that wasn't apparent from the mail that started this thread,
>> which asks for a "working definition of a profile", seemingly in general.
>>
>> In any case, this brings us to an important point:
>> we should be very precise when talking about "profile" in this group :-)
>
> +1
>
>> So is the question what we (as the DXWG group) will consider "a profile",
>> or is this about something more specific?
>>
>>> The contents of DCAP itself are not particularly relevant here I think.
>>
>> They aren't; I was only talking about profiles in my previous mail, so if you wish:
>>
>> – DCAP profile ⊂ ProfileNegotiation profile
>> – ODRL profile ⊂ ProfileNegotiation profile
>> – DCAP profile ⊄ ODRL profile  and  ODRL profile ⊄ DCAP profile
>
> I find the DCAP definition quite good. The only thing I wouldn't use in a definition of "profile" is the last bullet point:
>
> * defines the machine syntax that will be used to encode the data (Syntax Guidelines and Data Formats)
>
> The machine syntax should IMHO not be part of the profile but defined in one or more schemas (i. e. implementations of the profile), e. g. a SHACL document or an XML schema. We then of course need a machine-understandable mechanism to link profiles to schemas.
>

I think I agree to this. And the serializations (in various machine syntaxes) would be what is served in profile negotiation. Am I right?

Btw I'm surprised to see that the ProfileNegotiation profile would be more general than the DCAP one. DCAP profile is "a document (or set of documents) that specifies and describes the metadata used in a particular application." This is fairly general. Especially, it includes the possibility to specify vocabularies (ontologies) and extensions, which to me is more general than 'constraints'. I find the notion of 'constraint' becomes quite stretched if we include (in the documents to be served for a profile) human-readable documentation, as Karen reminded DCAP does [1].
But maybe that's because I understand 'constraints' in a more specific way, perhaps influences by recent work like SHACL.
In fact it may be not very far away: ontologies/vocabularies are 'specifications' and a broader meaning of 'constraints' could fit this.
Would there be any strong objection to understanding (and renaming) 'constraints' as 'specifications' in the ProfileNegotiation definition? Am I misunderstanding anything?

Cheers,

Antoine

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-dxwg-wg/2017Jun/0054.html

Received on Monday, 19 June 2017 15:08:19 UTC