RE: DCAT sub-group call 2019.03.13

Minutes of the meeting can be found here: https://www.w3.org/2019/03/13-dxwgdcat-minutes


The meeting addressed the most critical points in the agenda – specifically the publication planning (the steps to CR/PR discussed in the plenary the previous day) and any key decisions needed.  The meeting overran considerably – thank you to all who attended for their flexibility.

1.  After much discussion, the sub-group agreed on a way forward on data service/data api modelling in the context of this DCAT revision and the time available to progress it (https://www.w3.org/2019/03/13-dxwgdcat-minutes#x05). Obviously the (small) changes to the draft revision will be subject to review by the full WG before progressing to CR.  Essentially, the document will say less about sub-classes of data services than it does now, since we now feel that getting agreement (and ensuring that we get adequate coverage of practice in this space) isn’t practical in the time now available.  Any potential analysis and elaboration of this feature will be recorded in the backlog for future work

2. On the practical steps needed to get to a CR.  We have to follow through on the resolution in (1) and there are numerous editorial issues that need addressing. To manage this, we plan to use github milestones.  There are 2 of interest:  Open issues in DCAT CR (https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/milestone/14) will be those that must be addressed before CR, while Open issues in DCAT Backlog (https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/milestone/15) are those ‘features’ (to use the language from the plenary) or other issues that cannot be included in this new version of the DCAT spec for whatever reason.  We need to do a bit of work/review of issues to make sure the contents of these milestones are accurate but the bulk of the classification for the DCAT CR  should be done by end of day 15th March (CET).  At that point we should have an idea of whether its practical to get this done by end March. (Not yet clear if the Backlog will formally include all issues tagged as DCAT or only those where we have done work but have frozen them as incomplete at the time of the cut off, but please bear with us as we see what is useful)

This leaves one issue that we’d like to discuss in the plenary next week (19th March) and perhaps pass to the chairs to progress with W3 representatives/management.  At the end of this triage (and addressing the open issues in DCAT CR), we will be asking the WG to agree that the candidate recommendation is good to go.  It was clear in the DCAT sub-group meeting that people may feel that certain features or improvements to the recommendation can be deferred to a later version provided that later version is in the comparatively near future rather than years away.  This way of operating was mentioned in the plenary, but the details /process weren’t discussed in detail, and of course not all active WG members could attend that meeting.  Having a clearly defined plan (or simply an outline of the process we’ll be following) to address the backlog issues, with an understanding of the decision points should help us all understand the effect of the triage we are doing and hopefully make people more comfortable that the deferred issues will be looked after expeditiously.  For example, after the discussions on data service etc, it’s clear there is an opportunity to do more there and improve interoperability as a consequence, and it would be unfortunate to not follow up. In fact, publishing the DCAT revision in the way we plan to do may bring new use cases from a wider community, and allow the DCAT vocabulary to become more widely useful, but when we discussed this in the sub-group it wasn’t clear what the process would be to move on to a “1.2” if the charter expires in June.  Hopefully the contents of the backlog will help scope the appetite for continuation.

Hope that makes sense – might be easiest to discuss on the call on Tuesday.


From: david.browning@refinitiv.com [mailto:david.browning@refinitiv.com]
Sent: 12 March 2019 17:12
To: public-dxwg-wg@w3.org
Subject: DCAT sub-group call 2019.03.13

Draft agenda is at https://www.w3.org/2017/dxwg/wiki/Meetings:DCAT-Telecon2019.03.13



David Browning