- From: Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2010 22:53:51 +0100
- To: Linking Open Data <public-lod@w3.org>
This is a back to basics kind of question ... What sorts of entities are we happy to describe using Dublin Core Terms? The Dublin Core Abstract Model [1] talks about "described resources" which are described in the FAQ [2] as "anything addressable via a URL ... including various collections of documents and non-electronic forms of media such as a museum or library archive". I've always taken this to mean that such resources are Information Resources in the sense of http-range-14, not abstract concepts. So I've been happy using, say, dct:spatial to talk about the area covered by some report or some data set (c.f. its use in dcat [3]) but not happy to use it for, say, the area affected by some public project or administered by a local council. Various discussions have led me to question whether I'm being too restrictive here and whether the LOD general practice has evolved to use dcterms more broadly than that. The published schema for dcterms has no rdfs:domain declarations for the bulk of the properties and no class representing describable resources. So from a pure inference point of view using properties such as dct:spatial on an abstract thing like a project does no harm. The question is whether the informal semantics or best practice expectations suggest avoiding this. Dave [1] http://dublincore.org/documents/2007/06/04/abstract-model/ [2] http://dublincore.org/resources/faq/#whatisaresource [3] http://www.w3.org/egov/wiki/Data_Catalog_Vocabulary/Vocabulary_Reference#Property:_spatial.2Fgeographic_coverage
Received on Monday, 11 October 2010 21:54:28 UTC