Re: [dxwg] Dataset series (#868)

@makxdekkers I agree, adding additional properties on these resources (downloadable files) constitutes in some sense to extending the model from the perspective of DCAT. If this behaviour should be acknowledged and described in DCAT it would be appropriate to encourage the use of a new class like dcat:DownloadableFile.

However, I would like to point out two things:

**Just repeating dcat:downloadURL**
Repeating the property without providing additional properties would be within the current scope of DCAT. In many cases it is enough to just be able to point to several files that taken together make up a single distribution. This is what we are doing currently in Sweden from the harvester perspective.

**It depends on how explicit you want the DCAT model to be**
Even if I would prefer inclusion of such a class for clarity in the DCAT model, I would like to point out that there are already similar situations with other properties when this is not a requirement.
For instance, I think it is relevant to compare with dcat:endpointDescription, it's range is just described as rdfs:Resource and in many cases it will point to resources that for most practical purposes are downloadable files, like OpenAPI or WSDL. Hence, very close to dcat:downloadURL.
But the usage note also says that it is ok to embed an entire Hydra expression directly in the graph, which will indicate that the resource is not neccessarily a downloadable file. The only difference is between using dcat:downloadURL and dcat:endpointDescription in this case is in the second usage note. Adding such a note to dcat:downloadURL would be quite easy, right?

A very similar argument could be made for dct:rights which may point to a file or be a graph structure using something like ODRS.

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Received on Thursday, 19 September 2019 12:08:48 UTC