certification CertificationDetails vs certificationInfo DigitalLink

[VladimirAlexiev]

GS1 has these 2 props:

• https://www.gs1.org/voc/certification (gs1:CertificationDetails) "Information on certification to which the product complies."
• https://www.gs1.org/voc/certificationInfo (xsd:anyURI) "A link to certification information about the product."

It seems to me they have the same meaning, but they are defined differently:

• certification points to structured RDF (or hopefully also JSON/JSONLD) data. It's not listed in https://www.gs1.org/voc/?show=linktypes
• certificationInfo is unspecified and is presumably a HTML page or PDF document, but not machine-readable data. It is listed in https://www.gs1.org/voc/?show=linktypes

However, following semantic web principles, there should be one property that will return HTML, PDF, JSONLD, Turtle, etc based on content negotiation.

Specifically I propose to merge certificationInfo to certification (the shorter name is better, and "Info" is a parasitic word).

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There is one more property related to this issue: https://www.gs1.org/voc/masterData.

Currently it doesn't define what info it points to, but 2021_03_08b GS1-White-Paper-On-demand-master-data.docx gives an example (https://id.gs1.org/01/09528765123457/10/ABC123?linkType=gs1:masterData) returning JSONLD.

• the doc also says "It is also advisable to specify the preferred data format using HTTP Content Negotiation" but doesn't specify what's the default format if no Accept header is specified

Why could I not read this master data as HTML? I think that this property should be able to return both machine-readable and human-readable representations, with content negotiation.

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AFAIK, no other linktypes propose any structured representation. But if that happens in the future, they should follow the same web principles, rather than being split in two props.

Eg gs1:pip (Product Information Page) may be a good candidate.

[mgh128]

gs1:certification (linking a gs1:Product to a gs1:CertificationDetails class) was already in the GS1 Web vocabulary before GS1 Digital Link added a link type property gs1:certificationInfo to point to some certification info online, not necessarily returning machine-interpretable data or returning an instance of the gs1:CertificationDetails class.

gs1:certificationInfo neither forbids not requires that the returned data should be Linked Data.

Regarding gs1:masterData, we have not specified a default Media Type / data format for any of the GS1 Digital Link link types, nor does the definition at https://www.gs1.org/voc/masterData.
"A link to a source of structured master data for the entity. This is typically for B2B applications." could include a Web page with lists or tables - or a block of JSON, JSON-LD, XML.

HTML might be appropriate but it is probably for the brand owner / licensee to decide this themselves on a case by case basis. Most Web browsers will specify text/html by default and receive that if available. If nothing is specified via the Accept: header, then you just have to accept (or discard) whichever format is provided in response.