[dxwg] New UC - Specification documents with multiple roles (#978)

rob-metalinkage has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/dxwg:

== New UC - Specification documents with multiple roles ==
### Specification documents with multiple roles
Status: Proposed

Identifier:

Creator: Rob Atkinson

Deliverable(s): (AP Guidelines)

## Tags
''Optional space-separated list of tags out of the above catalog (extend on demand)''

## Stakeholders
In the main, people describing conformance of data in relation to requirements embedded in documents that contain multiple specifications or other information, such as recommendations, examples etc.

## Problem statement
It is common practice to write a single document that contains a range of different types of information. Some of this may be one or more formal specifications (often formalisms of these may be an appendix), examples, and non-binding recommendations. 

This needs explicit recognition for several reasons:
1) its a common and reasonable case
2) There is a tendency to confuse "the thing" and "the representation" - in this case "the thing" is the "named set of requirements" (that can be conformed to, can be further profiled, can be tested etc.) and the document (the representing artefact)
3) There is often a weakness in explicitly naming each set of requirements and suggestions in a citable way, so use of any functional approach to data description (e.g. dct:conformsTo statements means finding a way to name such requirements unambiguously.)
4) Documents often contain both mandatory requirements and suggestions, making statements of conformance difficult to understand if the document identifier is inappropriately used as a surrogate identifier for the specification component

## Existing approaches
In the OGC this is formally recognised by a policy to explicitly identify each "conformance Class" in such documents, and recognition that the pattern is typically a mandatory "core" and optional extensions.


## Links
http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/modularspec

## Requirements
Documents that perform multiple roles, such as multiple discrete sets of requirements, suggestions etc need provide stable identifiers for each logical grouping of specifications.

The role of documents w.r.t. specifications needs to be explicit

Each document may perform multiple roles w.r.t. specifications

## Related use cases

## Comments
Hopefully this will resolve some of the confusion around the nature of conformance by making it clear what conformance relates to.

This can be more explicitly modelled to provide working examples, and given profiling is a key role that may co-exist within the same document as a base specification it is reasonable to add classes and properties to express these requirements to the profile description ontology.


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Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/978 using your GitHub account

Received on Thursday, 4 July 2019 23:33:00 UTC