Re: [dxwg] property profileOfTransitive

@smrgeoinfo I really like your typology here. It is complementary to the more [general statement](https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/435#issuecomment-426928897) of typology that I was suggesting for the guidance document. This is the best description of both profile types/relationships and transitivity that I have seen so far.

It seems to me that we have two threads going on that are parallel but have different audiences. One is the world of profiles that exist mainly as documents, such as MS Word documents and PDFs. One could say that these are "old-fashioned and out of date" but they still exist in many communities and are an active part of the community data sharing. Obviously, they require a large amount of human capital to understand and use. They also lack precision, but it is often the case that the data these communities work with is not very conducive to precision. You find this kind of data in the cultural heritage area (libraries, museums, archives) as well as in the crowd-sourcing and open access area as in Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, etc. If you profile within these arenas, you're working with messy data and not much precision. This is similar to the environment that schema.org operates within. These communities can generally go no further than your type 6 in terms of relationships between profiles when they create them.

The other thread is what I would call "precision data" - where closely-aligned communities with a good degree of control over their data and data formats can have reasonably strict rules that can be modeled as formal constraints. These are your 1-5 types. As evidenced by the length of these two paragraphs, my experience is almost entirely in type 6. ;-) However, I see an opportunity here to align these types and provide guidance regarding the profile description elements that are needed to make these types functional. This mainly becomes a definition of this thing called "requirements". I'm interested in whether we feel we can tackle that in our document.

There have been statements that profiles of the type 6 are "useless" or simply do not work. I hope that we can rise above such judgments because we have many real world instances of folks using those types of profiles even though they are not easily subjected to algorithmic validation. We do need to include both worlds in our analysis and deliverable. The trick is going to be how we integrate the two into a single document, but I'm very encouraged that your analysis here may help us navigate that difficulty.


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Received on Thursday, 1 November 2018 20:32:31 UTC