Re: [dxwg] Reflect all 'Usage notes' into DCAT RDF representation (#725)

@makxdekkers This is true. It just explicitly attributes the annotation to the DCAT WG, which is, nevertheless, better than human-readably saying that everything in dcat.ttl is in the context of DCAT, in my opinion. I was just trying to suggest a bit more acceptable alternative to the direct annotation of `dcterms:issued` with no contextual info.

If we were to focus on the machine-readable expression of something applicable to `dcterms:issued` in the scope of DCAT, I do not see any ideal solution now. Here is what I see as options:

1. **Loose the semantics**: Leaving the usage notes in only in the human-readable part of the specification. There are no semantic conflicts here, but we miss some potentially valuable machine-readable info about how the selected reused properties are intended to be used in DCAT. I.e. user of the data will see an entity of type `dcat:Distribution` and see the generic `Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the resource.` description of `dcterms:issued`, instead of more specific explanation such as `Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the distribution.`.
2. **Subproperties**: This is semantically the cleanest option, if we really want to distinguish all the different usages and have a clean domain and range specification. Creating a subproperty of `dcterms:issued` (and others similarly), e.g. `dcat:distributionIssued rdfs:subPropertyOf dcterms:issued; dcat:distributionIssued rdfs:comment "Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the distribution."@en.` allows us to write all we want to about the property (clearly in the DCAT context), while maintaining the semantic relation to generic `dcterms:issued`. The downside here is the added overhead and need for users to understand the concept of subproperties. Nevertheless, this is the way we do it in the Czech Republic when creating RDF datasets when we need to say something specific in a context.
3. **Annotation**: A compromise solution is the suggested solution using OA, which attributes the (only human-readably DCAT specific) annotation to DCAT WG. A machine will see that DCAT WG is saying something about the generic `dcterms:title` and only a human will be able to understand what.

Maybe there are some other options I do not see now, but the original solution just does not seem right to me.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by jakubklimek
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/725#issuecomment-513733596 using your GitHub account

Received on Monday, 22 July 2019 10:21:34 UTC