Re: [dxwg] Use of dct:type with both Class and Concept

I'm coming into this discussion from the side, so please forgive me if I repeat points already made.

As @kcoyle may have mentioned, the DCMI Usage Board is actively reviewing DCMI Metadata Terms in the context of preparing ISO 15836 Part 2.  We are in the process of loosening the semantics of object properties by replacing rdfs:range with a yet-to-be-coined DCMI version of the Schema.org property rangeIncludes.  We still need to finalize details, but the Usage Board is in principle solidly behind this move.  In so doing, we will revise the DCMI Namespace Policy to explicitly allow loosening of semantics. For the case discussed in this thread, the loosening would mean that the object of a statement using dct:type, such as a SKOS concept, would no longer be inferred to be (also) an rdfs:Class.

DCMI went perhaps a step too far when it originally assigned a formal range of rdfs:Class because rdf:type already had a range of rdfs:Class, and because it seems in retrospect unreasonable to expect that values used with dct:type must be inferrable to be RDF classes or explicitly declared in RDF to be classes.  One finds, in the wild, SKOS concepts used as types (@makxdekkers points to an example), which to me seems quite reasonable.

As I think several people have noted in this thread, it is always possible to define stronger restrictions in an application profile, or to enforce a particular interpretation for a property with a validation scheme.

-- 
Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>


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Received on Thursday, 30 August 2018 13:56:22 UTC