Re: Naive question on DCAT versioning

Hi all,

This is clearly an important issue, and a complex one.  As you'll see below, it was originally in scope for this Working Group as a part of Best Practices — but we decided to park it, due to the lack of resources within our group.

I'd encourage the DCAT editors and commenters to find a short-term (but effective) way to settle this for DCAT and ADMS, with the understanding that further work is necessary to approach versioning for all open data. 

(And, of course, I would encourage you all to get involved in future working groups to tackle this issue!)

Cheers,

   Hadley


Hadley Beeman
Co-chair
W3C Government Linked Data Working Group


Versioning was recognised in our original charter:  [1]

     2.2 Best Practices for Publishing Linked Data
 
    • Versioning. The group will specify how to publish data which has multiple versions, including variations such as:

		• data covering different time periods
		• corrected data about the same time period
		• the same data published using different vocabularies, formats, and presentation styles
		• retracting published data

However — we did take the decision, as a working group, to "only briefly discuss" versioning in the forthcoming Best Practices note, because "We don't have the time/expertise to do more." [3]

It's also worth mentioning that "publishing and accessing versions of datasets" is currently within the scope of the draft charter for the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group. [4]  That group should have the time and capacity to explore this issue with the depth it deserves.


[1] http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/charter
[2] http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/wiki/Best_Practices_Discussion_Summary#Versioning
[3] http://www.w3.org/2013/04/11-gld-minutes.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2013/05/odbp-charter.html


On 31 Jul 2013, at 19:45, Ghislain Atemezing wrote:

> Dear Antoine,
> 
> Sorry if I missed your point in my previous mail...
>> @Ghislain: I'm not sure I understand your point: "as far as it is reflected in the metadata, such as dct:modified" seems to hint that you're just updating an existing instance of dcat:Dataset. But my point is about when there is a *new resource* of dcat:Dataset, as explained above.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/#Class:_Dataset does not say anything about whether such treatment is allowed or discouraged in DCAT. And thus if ADMS is compliant with DCAT or not.
> 
> Now that I read the entire thread with Makx, I understand better your point. And I agree there is nothing at the moment in DCAT to handle that issue properly.
> I wonder if this issue of versioning affects only DCAT. Maybe one solution could be to help the user by clarifying it somewhere in the spec; or maybe handling it like in the ORG vocabulary [1] by creation 
> a dcat:DataSetEvent by linking to PROV-O vocabulary (e.g: with prov:wasDerivedFrom property). 
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Ghislain
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/#org:ChangeEvent
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/#wasDerivedFrom

Received on Thursday, 1 August 2013 13:06:49 UTC