ADMS high level comments

Phil mentioned that [1] is nearing the stage where we'll be asked to 
vote for publication as First Pass Working Draft.

This is not a detailed review but some high level observations. I 
appreciate that FPWD is not the same as last call (!) but ideally I 
would like issues like these to be at least formally recorded on the 
tracker and acknowledged in editorial notes in the document before FPWD.

(1) My fundamental concern is that it is not clear what makes a Semantic 
Asset different from any other asset and so why it makes sense for GLD 
to publish ADMS as well as DCAT.

The document does try to address this but I, at least, was not convinced.

The history of metadata tells us that is very hard to distinguish data 
from metadata. I see no reason why a DataSet in the DCAT sense isn't a 
Semantic Asset and vice versa.

So a GLD outsider, who didn't know the political history, might expect 
ADMS to be essentially a DCAT profile.

(2) The relationship between the listed classes/properties and actual 
expression as an RDFS/OWL vocabulary is not sufficiently clear.

This has been raised before, and I understand the historical reasons 
behind it, but at some point this will need fixing and *some* 
clarification is needed before FPWD.

Apart from the use of informal labels instead of localnames or curis 
there are properties in here which (correctly) don't exist in the 
vocabulary itself - notably "id". This makes the document a very 
misleading guide to the vocabulary.

(3) The one thing that you do need with semantic assets, that you many 
not need elsewhere, is information on closure. You need to be able to 
state that some particular enumeration of codes in a codelist is 
complete and that a code not listed there is invalid. Is this use case 
supposed to be supported by ADMS?

I see that you can represent hierarchical containment of assets through 
adms:includedAsset but there's nothing about closure or completeness 
either as guidelines in the document or as a metadata term.

(4) There's a lot of use of the term "file". This seems inappropriate in 
a W3C spec, especially one about semantic assets. Surely a common case 
will be things like code lists, represented in SKOS and made available 
as Linked Data.

This may be "just" a terminology problem but it is a jarring one.

(5) This is a nitpick but it seems odd that translations are distinct 
SemanticAssets whereas representations are just distinct Distributions. 
If I represented a schema in RDFS instead of XSLT that's a much bigger 
change than if I translated it's labels to French.

Dave

[1] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/gld/raw-file/default/adms/index.html

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2012 16:20:14 UTC