- From: Stephen Richard via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 20:08:36 +0000
- To: public-dxwg-wg@w3.org
What is a profile for? My answer would be that the purpose is to convey to an agent (human or software) information necessary for it to determine whether the target of a dcat:distribution is available in a representation (serialization + vocabulary + conventions) that the agent can use for some process it wants to execute. In practice, a dcat:Distribution/dct:conformsTo could have a URI value that would dereference to a profile description; there might also be tokens like MIME types to use in content negotiation. I think the discussion above indicates that the concept of profile here should be generalized to mean what I'd like to call a specification (sensu M-W 2a "a detailed precise presentation of something or of a plan or proposal for something"). In the technical arena, a standard is a specification that is either widely used or formally adopted by some authority. As outlined above, a profile seems to be a specification designed for some specific community or set of requirements; it may utilize part or all of one or more other specifications. This profile ontology needs to define an information model for 'specifications' to allow intelligent clients to determine whether something conforming to the specification is going to be useful. What we'd like is that a URI identifying a spec can be dereferenced to obtain a description of the spec. For humans, a document describing the specification should be available. An rdf representation using the prof:Profile ontology would be for software agents. This machine actionable description asserts relationships between a described spec (the profile) and other known specifications, conformance tests, or(?) some other kind of artefact. It seems to me that there are likely to be a variety of these kind of relationships, which would be specified by the prof:ResourceRole vocabulary proposed in the draft profile doc. -- GitHub Notification of comment by smrgeoinfo Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/435#issuecomment-434829948 using your GitHub account
Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2018 20:08:45 UTC