Re: Resolving ISSUE-54, relationship of DCAT to VoID

I believe the language "...DCAT is designed to describe any sort of
dataset but always within the context of a catalog..." is too strong.
As always with W3C vocabularies, adopters are free to adopt
vocabularies in an à la carte fashion. "Always" looks like "must" to
me. "Usually" is perhaps better?

There are many use cases for DCAT in the scientific community in which
the notion of a catalog does not fit with current practice -- *we*
might be able to make the concept fit, but the scientists might not be
ready to.* Yet the dataset model fits nicely.

John
[*] There are of course many, MANY examples in scientific data
management in which the catalog model fits beautifully...

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Phil Archer <phila@w3.org> wrote:
> The proposal says that DCAT will include
>
> * an informative reference to VoID,
>  * a brief explanation of the difference in scope between both vocabularies,
>  * a pointer to a place that talks about the relationship in more detail,
> which would ideally be an updated VoID spec.
>
> Which seems right. However, do you or Fadi have some suggested text? Please
> improve on this, for example:
>
> The VoID vocabulary is widely used to describe linked data sets that may or
> may not be published within a catalog. DCAT is designed to describe any sort
> of dataset but always within the context of a catalog. This difference in
> use case is what leads to the differences between the two vocabularies.
> Publishers are encouraged to publish metadata about their linked data sets
> using VoID in addition to records that appear in catalogs that use DCAT.
>
> That's quite a strong endorsement of VoID of course but as an informative
> bit of text we should be OK.
>
> Phil.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 08/03/2013 11:26, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
>>
>> There are two remaining issues on DCAT that we couldn't address in the
>> telco. A Proposals for one of them is below. If you have any objection to
>> the proposed course of action, please say so via email.
>>
>>
>> ISSUE-54: Relationship of DCAT and VoID
>> https://www.w3.org/2011/gld/track/issues/54
>>
>> PROPOSAL: Resolve ISSUE-54 by adding the following text to the DCAT
>> introduction:
>>
>> [[
>> Data can come in many formats, ranging from spreadsheets over XML and RDF
>> to various speciality formats. DCAT does not make any assumptions about the
>> format of the datasets described in a catalog. Other, complementary
>> vocabularies may be used together with DCAT to provide more detailed
>> format-specific information. For example, properties from the VoID
>> vocabulary [[VoID]] can be used to express various statistics about a
>> DCAT-described dataset if that dataset is in RDF format.
>> ]]
>>
>>
>
> --
>
> Phil Archer
> W3C eGovernment
>
> http://philarcher.org
> +44 (0)7887 767755
> @philarcher1
>



-- 
John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
Director, Web Science Operations
Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
<http://tw.rpi.edu> <olyerickson@gmail.com>
Twitter & Skype: olyerickson

Received on Friday, 8 March 2013 12:51:08 UTC