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SEMICeu / DCAT-AP

This is the issue tracker for the maintenance of DCAT-AP
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/dcat-application-profile-data-portals-europe
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Ease of reading the document #391

Open JanHjelmager opened 2 months ago

JanHjelmager commented 2 months ago

In order to make it easier to see the relation between the metadata elements described in the document, we suggest to include a graphic presentation of the elements. Such graphic presentation should include the metadata elements, their attributes as well as their internal relation. To be inspired we can recommend to see how ISO 19115 and 19115-1 have done this graphic presentation.

If one look at the diagram on page 7, it is not readable if you read the diagram in the printed version.

EmidioStani commented 2 months ago

Hello @JanHjelmager, when you are referring to a diagram in page 7, what is you reference here ?

The diagram is currently included in the HTML page: https://semiceu.github.io/DCAT-AP/releases/3.0.0/#application-profile-diagram

JanHjelmager commented 2 months ago

As you can see in my comment I have a printed version of the document. I have not seen anywhere that the document should be an online document only.

bertvannuffelen commented 2 months ago

@JanHjelmager I like to share a bit of history.

In the past we had only a printed copy available. That resulted in many editorial coherency issues and various copies floating around. On community request and in line with W3C and other semantic specification we decided to follow the web-only approach. (See e.g. https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-3/). This ensures a higher form of coherency and the ability to interlink the specification with examples, tools, codelists, etc.

To make a print friendly and a online friendly version at the same time would require additional effort. For instance, cross-referencing in written documents is different than a hyperlink in an online document. So it is not only your concern of a figure that is too small when printed, printing is also impacting the narrative of the document.

We assume here that users (implementers) use this specification as working reference and that they will build other specifications that refer to this specification. For instance https://semiceu.github.io/GeoDCAT-AP/releases/3.0.0/#Catalogue has cross references for properties to DCAT-AP, while DCAT-AP has cross-references to W3C DCAT. (Other speficications that add constraints to DCA-AP are MobilityDCAT-AP, Health DCAT-AP, https://www.dcat-ap.de/, ...) This allows you to follow the decisions for an individual property across domains (documented in distinct specifications). Creating a printed version that neatly would integrate all that information would be nearly impossible.

Our efforts are thus to maintain and further facilitate the active use of the specification knowledge. A nice printed version is however lower on our priority.