Clarification required: BP 16 "Provide a minimum set of information for your intended application"

BP 16 "Provide a minimum set of information for your intended application"
[1] is one of the few 'orphaned' best practices left in the document.

...

In the BP sub-group call on 24-Aug (minutes [2]), we were discussing what
to do with another best practice "Provide context required to interpret
observation data values" [3] (now removed from the Editor's Draft following
that discussion). We thought that that was too specific for the general
best practice doc (it was purely about sensors) - but was an example of a
more general concern about how to interpret "data instance level metadata"
(as Rob Atkinson referred to it); how we find out what a piece of data
actually means.

We need to be careful not to stray beyond our self-imposed scope of
"spatial". It's tempting to provide guidance on publishing data with
well-described semantics for all properties, attributes and link relations
- but these general concerns are covered in by DWBP's best practices 15
"Reuse vocabularies, preferably standard ones" [3] and 16 "Choose the right
formalisation level" [4].

SDW best practice 16 "Provide a minimum set of information for your
intended application" [1] seems to extend DWBP's best practice 16 (and
probably best practice 15 too) by looking at the properties that are needed
to differentiate between spatial things. This is dependent on the intended
application ...

As a bear minimum (e.g. for _all_ applications) we need a human-readable
label (provided in at least one language that is familiar to the intended
user community) and a Type declaration (e.g. what kind of spatial thing is
this?) that can be interpreted using on-line documentation (published
somewhere).

However, I think that these elements are required (or at least strongly
recommended) when you use schema.org to provide structured mark-up ... ref.
SDW BP 4 "Make your data indexable by search engines".

I propose that we merge the points about including Type and Label into BP 4.

Concerns about spatial vagueness (e.g. definition of things without precise
geometries), Req 5.43 "Spatial Vagueness" [6], could be covered off using a
best practice about the use of spatial relations [7] within the section on
Describing Location [8].

Thoughts please.

Jeremy


[1]: http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#minimum
[2]: http://www.w3.org/2016/08/24-sdwbp-minutes.html
[3]: http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#ReuseVocabularies
[4]: http://w3c.github.io/dwbp/bp.html#ChooseRightFormalizationLevel
[5]: http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#indexable-by-search-engines
[6]: https://www.w3.org/TR/sdw-ucr/#SpatialVagueness
[7]: http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#spatial-relations
[8]: http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#bp-expr-geo