My action regarding the Data on the Web best practices

Dear all,

first of all my apologies for tomorrow.

In Barcelona we had a discussion in the Best Practices group related to the
publishing geospatial reference data use case I had submitted (
https://www.w3.org/2015/spatial/wiki/Working_Use_Cases#Publishing_geospatial_reference_data_.28Best_Practice.29
).

The point of discussion was whether the a part of the use case has any
spatial aspects to it or whether it is just like any other data on the web,
and consequently it is out-of-scope for us but we have to rely on this
being covered by the parallel Data on the Web Best Practice activity.

To recap, there were in particular two aspects. Assume that a cadastral
agency wants to put its parcel geometries together with the well-known
parcel identifier (not a URI, a local string identifier) on the web. Other
datasets will (implicily) link to the cadastral parcel data by using the
parcel identifiers. Assume that such a dataset, e.g. records of real estate
sales, is available as a CSV file on the web, and that the provider of the
data may not be interested in providing the data set in a web-friendly way
with explicit links to the parcel location using URIs.

The two aspects discussed in Barcelona related to best practices are:
a. Is there anything that the cadastral agency should/can do, to make it
easy for others that have some data with parcel identifiers to join the
data, i.e. to get location information for their data?
b. How could the publisher of the real estate sale data help others that
want to use the data to make the explicit link to the reference dataset so
that they can get the location context of the data?

Other examples for such geospatial reference datasets are statistical
units, postal codes, administrative units, etc.

So, the question was: does the Data on the Web Best Practice work address
these issues? I took the action in Barcelona to have a look.

My conclusion is: maybe.

My source has been the use case/requirements document (
http://www.w3.org/TR/dwbp-ucr
<http://www.w3.org/TR/dwbp-ucr/#R-PersistentIdentification>) and the best
practices draft (http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html).

It was not always easy to understand, if these aspects are in-scope of a
use case or not. As an aside, a surprising number of their use cases have a
spatial component. Anyhow, I have then mainly looked at the requirements
they have identified from the use cases. I have identified two requirements
that might address the above:

 http://www.w3.org/TR/dwbp-ucr/#R-DataEnrichment
 "It should be possible to perform some data enrichment tasks in order to
aggregate value to data, therefore providing more value for user
applications and services."

 http://www.w3.org/TR/dwbp-ucr/#R-GeographicalContext
"GeographicalContext (countries, regions, cities etc.) must be referred to
consistently. GeographicalContext is a type of metadata, so all metadata
requirements also apply here."

It is not clear, how they interpret these requirements and if they cover
the requirements in our reference data use case. The current draft of the
best practices document does not yet address these requirements. I also
could not find any other part on the current best practices draft that
addresses the requirements.

Maybe someone else has more information as I have noted that several from
our group are also involved in the Data on the Web group.

Best regards,
Clemens