Re: [dxwg] Use of "standard" (#792)

remember we are subclassing dct:Standard and hence using its loose defitinition of standard - there is nothing about formal recognition of standards bodies etc.

One comment has suggested renaming Profile to be Specification.  I do not favour this because it doesnt add anything to the definition of dct:Standard except a better name, and the Profiles Vocabulary is specifically scoped to address needs of profiling.  There is nothing to stop use of resourceDescriptors and roles against a dct:Standard (or another equivalent Specification class).

I dont think we have collected all possible Use Cases for a general Specification ontology, but we know the Profile issues.   We could rename Profile to Specification and the ontology to "Specifications and Profiles Vocabulary".  

Pros: makes it explicit that the role-qualified resources can be used for any specification and addresses absence of a more general vocabulary
Cons: potential arguments about claiming greater scope and lack of consultation with all possible specification writing communities 

my view: better something agreed and useful than a future perfect all-encompassing scope

possible option:

add a new class Specification in the hierarchy (between dct:Standard and pro:Profile and axiomitise that a Profile has at least one isProfileOf relationship.

if the then rename to Specification and Profiles Vocabulary it then reflects that it at least refers to Specification from the perspective of profiling.

note that this makes no statement about formality of profiles or standards - it merely allows description of them. Other vocabularies could be used for that information if required.

My proposed response to Paul Walk would be "the term Standard derives from the usage in Dublin Core which does not proscribe any specific status, other than some community using it as a reference point." The association of namespaces with specifications (or "standards") is an artefact of encoding - and the Profiles vocabulary makes no assumptions about encoding or whether such a namespace is defined or unique. So the vocabulary supports the the "metadata profiles" use case you refer to, but applies to more general cases of specification expression."

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Received on Wednesday, 13 March 2019 22:57:07 UTC