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Re: ISSUE-12 (valuesForDataFormat): What values to use to describe formats of dcat:Distribution? [DCAT]

From: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 20:33:19 +0000
Cc: Government Linked Data Working Group WG <public-gld-wg@w3.org>, Government Linked Data Working Group Issue Tracker <sysbot+tracker@w3.org>
Message-Id: <746208BF-D124-4B5F-99B9-BF34C3F4B9F2@cyganiak.de>
To: Sarven Capadisli <sarven.capadisli@deri.org>
Hi Sarven,

On 9 Feb 2012, at 17:53, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
> I favour option 3, provided that we do some homework and gather a list of formats that are currently published in the wild, and mint up those URIs e.g., http://www.w3.org/ns/formats/Shapefile .

This working group is scheduled to end in April 2013, but that won't stop people from inventing new file formats afterwards. So this approach either dooms DCAT to built-in obsolescence (bad!), or imposes a long-term maintenance burden on someone (and who will that be?)

The Right Thing to do would be to get IETF to mint URIs for all media types, and get ESRI to register a media type for their file format, etc. This may not be feasible.

A review of the file formats present in typical popular catalogs may help to settle the question. Many use a small controlled vocabulary of formats anyways, while others use free text.

Richard
Received on Thursday, 9 February 2012 20:33:48 UTC

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