dataset syntax metadata

I'm surprised at some of the responses about the metadata questions in 
my "Dataset Syntax - checking for consensus" email [1].

When people publish RDF for real, don't they usually put some triples in 
it which indicates who created it, when it was created, and maybe why?   
Maybe some folks don't do this, but many people consider this an 
essential practice.   My sense is that every computer format either has 
a metadata mechanism built into it, or one somehow gets hacked in later 
(like the javadoc conventions).  In a few cases (like the Adobe formats) 
that metadata is expressed in RDF.

When people publish an RDF dataset, aren't they going to want to do the 
same thing?

Yes, sometimes you can just throw that metadata into a named graph, but 
what if (a) you don't get a chance to tell the consumer which named 
graph you put it in, and (b) some named graphs are opaque/untrustred, 
perhaps because they contain old information or information from other 
souces (eg a Web Crawl).    (While these might not be the cases you work 
with, it seems to me they'll be quite common if this syntax ever catches 
on.)

Folks who are not convinced we need a metadata mechanism -- how do you 
imagine solving this problem?  How can someone reading a serialized 
dataset figure out which triples are the metadata?

       -- Sandro



[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2012Sep/0249.html

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2012 12:53:19 UTC