Re: [dxwg] A short token to specify a profile may be used as long as there is a discoverable mapping from it to the profile's identifying URI [ID5] (5.5) (#290)

Thanks Ruben for pushing the architecture angle.. its where so many things fail to translate to implementation that works..

A client needs to "know" a URI in exactly the same way... but external systems are empowered to make unambiguous and navigable assertions using URIs  .. which is why the list profiles mechanism is provided, and can be added to a system that already expects clients know tokens, to improve its interoperability and self-description.

Clients may also know the identifier from a catalog.. such as DCAT. The same way it may know the server location and capabilities.
From server and data metadata it may also be able to gain information via the Profiles ontology now URI identifiers support this linkage.  Once you have a description or have found the service endpoint the client "knows" both what the URI might mean in relation to standards it can use as well as the token mapping.

Architecturally we are trying to make servers a little better at being self describing, but still expect most descriptions to be via some form of catalog or specific documentation. In its current form i think it improves the capacity to describe services that all content profiles to be specified for information retrieval purposes.  Hopefully the extra step of looking up tokens would encourage people to use well known URIs  but without well known URIs already it would be difficult to convince people to both change their systems AND have faith in a wide acceptance of such URIs as well known or dereferencable to get useful descriptions.

Without this assumption that the client may know about a profile there is a higher bar that URIs must be resolvable and to be useful that means a canonical description.  The profiles vocabulary provides a canonical means to discover the relationships necessary to map a clients knowledge of profiles it needs or supports with profiles offered by a server .. and constraints specifications.. but it doesnt attempt to harmonise all those constraint description methods. Its also too early to mandate a fully self describing approach but the introduction of URI identifiers as mandatory provides a hook for future improvement.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by rob-metalinkage
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/290#issuecomment-525940470 using your GitHub account

Received on Wednesday, 28 August 2019 22:04:45 UTC