[dxwg] Data catalogues should not treated services as first class citizens

davebrowning has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/dxwg:

== Data catalogues should not treated services as first class citizens ==
(Issue created to track comments received on Second PWD of DCAT Recommendation from Clemens Portele - email archived [here](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-dxwg-comments/2018Oct/0002.html))

The rationale for making services first class citizens in data catalogs is not clear to me. The model of DCAT 1.0 is in this area, in my view, clearer and more useful from an end user perspective. The items registered in a *data* catalog should be restricted to data (that is: datasets - unless you register individual items). As a user I go to a data catalog looking for datasets, not services; once I have found some candidate datasets then I want to understand how to access the data, whether that is a file download, through webpages or an API. This relationship is described in the Data on the Web Best Practices (https://www.w3.org/TR/dwbp/#context), too.

While DCAT 1.0 does not provide sufficient detail or guidance for documenting the different kinds of distributions. A downloadable file is straightforward, but an API could benefit from more information than what DCAT 1.0 supports. From the UCR document I expected that the revision of DCAT would improve Distribution instead of adding Services as additional, separate resources in the mix. The separation between Distribution and Service looks blurred to me, with overlap and redundancies in their properties. Please reconsider this design decision.

In my view, the current direction is repeating some of the mistakes that the spatial data community made in their standards.

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/530 using your GitHub account

Received on Sunday, 4 November 2018 16:42:50 UTC