Re: [dxwg] Are PROF roles misplaced in resourceDescription? (#769)

whether DCAT has roles is not the issue (though if Distributions are no information-equivalent this does implicitly suggest a need to explain the role).

the role and the artifact location are separated - it would be quite possible (and useful) to declare the title of a document that provides guidance even if a URI location is not currently known.  This is less useful for machine readable artifacts obviously. 

so the explanation of the issue is that an artifact may be referenced by a Profile using a ProfileResource relation and statements about its role made independently of other information about the artifact. The profiles vocabulary allows information about the artifact (such as its format, available profiles) to be declared as properties of the ProfileResource, instead of the artefact itself, in the same way DCAT allows properties of a Distribution to be declared independently of it access URL.  

Options are:
1) do nothing, making cataloguing of profiles using DCAT simple, and making Linked Data implementation simpler, as we dont have to resolve artefact URIs to find these properties in general.
2) declare a new class of things "Artefact" that has these properties and force them to be present and declare the ProfileResource
3) define a set of entailment rules - so that these properties may be declared on an artifact or a ProfileResource

having a proxy for the actual artifact in a namespace you control (i.e. a Distribution or a ProfileResource) makes Linked data easier to realise IMHO - we dont have to access artefacts to get properties to see if we wanted to access them in the first place, and we dont force the publisher of all artifacts to support content negotiation and canoncial metadata views.. we can talk about existing artefacts.

option 3 might be a compromise here - implementers can decide if they want to force servers and clients to include selected metadata about each artifact in graphs.


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Received on Monday, 4 March 2019 03:04:13 UTC