Re: ADMS high level comments

On 2012-10-12, at 4:40 AM, Dave Reynolds wrote:

> On 12/10/12 05:52, James McKinney wrote:
> 
>>> (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.
>> 
>> Wouldn't you need some OWL for that? e.g. owl:oneOf for your "code not listed there is invalid" case. ADMS wants to be technology-neutral, so not sure how that sort of axiom is generally described in such documents. I assume users of ADMS could add these sorts of axioms, and that ADMS need not define any itself. It's possible not all users of ADMS will want the same axioms.
> 
> My question was about whether the use case is supposed to be within scope rather than the technology approach.
> 
> On technology approach then no you don't *have* to use OWL, what you need is a way to state whether a collection of assets is closed or not.
> You don't have to use something that is intrinsically closed. But if you did then, for example, RDF lists are closed.

I brought up both scope and technology, though I should have brought up scope only.

In terms of scope, my question is: Would some users not want closure, or can we assume that all use cases will want closure? My answer would be yes to the former and to let the users add closure rules.


>>> (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.
>> 
>> I searched the document, and all mentions of "file" are near mentions of "distribution." Can you point to a specific problematic case?
> 
> Why does putting "file" near to "distribution" make it any better?

Re-reading, it could use with fewer mentions of "file". Files are introduced as the typical examples of distributions: "A Distribution is typically a downloadable computer file". However, some of the language makes it seem like distributions are always files: "This Semantic Asset has two distributions, that is, accessible files". Most other mentions of "file" are with respect to "file format" or "files in distributions". How would you generally describe the situation of PDFs in a ZIP? "distributions in distributions"?