Dear Ghislain,
I would interpret the Dublin Core directive a little differently. Recognize that it isn’t just standards that can be conformed to. As I noted earlier, you can conform to any technical specification, because technical specifications contain the same kinds of provisions (requirements, recommendations, statements, and instructions – also in Guide 2) that standards do. They just may not have been developed through some standardization process. Plus, technical specifications are examples of DC:Standards per the DC definition you gave below. Therefore, DCAT is a technical specification which may be conformed to, and the use of the word “standard” in the DC definition of DC:ConformsTo is really just any technical specification.
Yours,
Dan
From: Ghislain Atemezing [mailto:auguste.atemezing@eurecom.fr]
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 12:11 PM
To: Gillman, Daniel - BLS
Cc: rufus.pollock@okfn.org; public-gld-comments@w3.org; David Raznick; James Gardner; Maali, Fadi; Richard Cyganiak; Ross Jones
Subject: Re: Comments on DCat
Dear Dan,
Thanks for the clarification.
I will try to use the dcterms [1] classes and property to understang better this issue..
Other kinds of requirements will come up, too. For instance, if there are relationships between meanings, those need to be adhered to in a system that makes use of the vocabulary. It is hard to enumerate all the possibilities, because vocabularies come in many kinds. However, I hope this gives you the flavor.
I will take the classe "Standard" and the property "conformsTo"
According to Dublin Core, a http://purl.org/dc/terms/Standard is "A basis for comparison; a reference point against which other things can be evaluated."
They also defines the relation http://purl.org/dc/terms/conformsTo as follow: "An established standard to which the described resource conforms.", with the class "Standard" as the range.
So IMO, if we agree that a given vocab (here DCAT) is a "Standard" (according to Dublin Core) to describe Data catalogs, maybe we have the answer that any provider describing the dataset according to the terms (even subset of the vocabs) and the semantics associated to them; "conformsTo" DCAT.
If DCAT could not be taken as a "Standard" here, then we should maybe find another word than "conformance".
Best,
Ghislain
[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dcmi-terms/
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Ghislain A. Atemezing
EURECOM, Multimedia Communications Department
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