Re: [dxwg] Question: how to catalog relational database data in DCAT? (#1240)

@dominik-s0 , we have discussed your use case [during our last meeting](https://www.w3.org/2020/07/01-dxwgdcat-minutes.html#t03). Our understanding is that your requirements fit better into a specific DCAT extension (see [§14. DCAT Profiles](https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-2/#profiles)) rather than the "core" DCAT vocabulary, whose scope is meant to address more general use cases, and with a specific focus on Web-based data access. This may of course change in the future if additional use cases will be contributed which demonstrate such requirements being relevant across domains. However, for the moment, we do not plan to support these features in a new version of DCAT.

Coming to the possible DCAT extension, we think that your use case is very much related to "distributions accessible via a service/API" (although your scenario does not concern _Web_ services/APIs) - for some examples, see [§5.9 A dataset available through a service](https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-2/#a-dataset-available-from-a-service). For the specification of the connection string / DSN, the relevant pattern could be:

````turtle
a:Dataset a dcat:Dataset ; 
  dcat:distribution [ a dcat:Distribution ;
    dcat:accessService [ a dcat:DataService ;
      dcat:endpointDescription :url-pointing-to-a-machine-readable-description-of-the-endpoint 
  ]
] .
````

So, you may consider defining specific properties and classes to point to a database, instead of a `dcat:DataService`. E.g., it could be something along these lines:

````turtle
a:Dataset a dcat:Dataset ; 
  dcat:distribution [ a dcat:Distribution ;
    ex:accessDatabase [ a ex:Database ;
      ex:connectionString "jdbc:oracle:thin:@​hostname:1521:my-database"
  ]
] .
````

About how to specify access to specific table in a database, as I said a similar issue is currently being discussed, so you may be interested in following and contributing to the discussion in https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/1230


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Received on Thursday, 2 July 2020 23:58:21 UTC