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

Hi,
This is a really important point you raise.  It is a topic that gov't LOD providers really need to consider & get right.  It includes both technical aspects and organizational commitment.  

It is not a new problem, the library community has been dealing with this issue since the mid-1990s, but settled on a single institutional commitment in perpetuity by OCLC (http://oclc.org, who runs http://purl.org).  Some in the library community occasionally complain (rightly) about the possibility that OCLC won't be around forever.

We in the Linked Data community have been leveraging purl.org for some time, without thinking about long term persistence very much.  OCLC runs purl.org for the library community, not for us, and also runs it out of their R&D department with little in the way of support resources.  Perhaps we should consider doing better, especially for governments.

Dave Wood and James Leigh thought about this a lot in 2010 and developed an architecture for long term social commitment for persistent identifiers.  Some of the requirements came from Stanford, MIT and Mayo Clinic (via the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, NCBO and the Shared Names organization).  The result was a "PURL Federation" in which any single organization could come or go over time, and which would ensure that everyone's identifiers would be served.  It is documented here [1].

Perhaps we should discuss this process in relation to long term government commitment to identifiers?

Cheers,
Bernadette Hyland

[1] http://code.google.com/p/persistenturls/wiki/PURLFederationArchitecture


On Feb 10, 2012, at 10:19 AM, Phil Archer wrote:

> I'm getting some push-back from gov data publishers on using DBpedia sadly (it's third party, it's not real, it's not stable, not like all our wonderful government department Web sites that sometimes stay on line for whole months!). The PROMOM effort that Dave has highlighted looks like the kind of thing they'd like more - government agency to government agency - as long as there's no ".uk" anywhere in the URIs I guess.
> 
> How about "use a stable URI scheme for file formats if available, falling back to the MIME type if not available" ?
> 
> Phil.
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/02/2012 15:06, John Erickson wrote:
>>>> 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.
>> 
>> ...or maybe we could just follow the same, de facto convention we've
>> been following of using URIs from A Certain Third party:
>> 
>> http://dbpedia.org/resource/TIFF
>> http://dbpedia.org/resource/JPEG
>> http://dbpedia.org/resource/GZIP
>> 
>> ...etc. ;)
>> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> Phil Archer
> W3C eGovernment
> http://www.w3.org/egov/
> 
> http://philarcher.org
> +44 (0)7887 767755
> @philarcher1
>