Re: [dxwg] Rename Resource Descriptor class (#573)

@makxdekkers Thanks, Makx. I'm sure that the DCAT users are all well-versed in the DCAT format, so this doesn't throw them off. The target audience for anything related to profiles generally is much broader so we can't count on users having "inside information." For that reason, conforming to basic RDF is more important.

As to your second point, this has been discussed in #769 and in particular at this [comment](https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/769#issuecomment-466404671). dcat:Distribution is a class for a "downloadable file", if I understand correctly, and describes the nature of that file. The role defined in PROF is not the nature of the file, it is a relationship between the profile and the file (called 'artifact' in PROF). The same file can have different roles, either in the same profile or in other profiles. So the file description and the role are not one-to-one, and therefore need to be separated. Otherwise, every use of a file with a different role will require a new description, which isn't a good idea, especially when it comes to sharing.

An example of this is the library community that is developing an RDF vocabulary for cataloging, and now has software that allows anyone to create a profile from that same vocabulary based on their own needs and cataloging software. There will be thousands of profiles as libraries using this vocabulary, world-wide, create one or more profiles for their own work. This means that there will be a lot of sharing of the basic vocabulary, some sharing of profiles, and there are also common rules for input that will undoubtedly be "profiled" to fit the many application profiles. The fact that these resources will not be held neatly in silos but will be widely shared means that 1) the descriptors need stable URIs (not bnodes) and 2) the roles and descriptors need to be separate so that they can vary independently.

I really see the DCAT use case and the Profiles use case to be very different, and that is why I don't think that just adopting DCAT's Distribution is a good fit.

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Received on Thursday, 21 March 2019 22:20:17 UTC