Support description of legal authorities

[simsong]

Support description of legal authorities

Status:

Identifier:

Creator: (your name)

Deliverable(s): DCATv3

Tags

dcat,profile,dataset,documentation,provenance

Stakeholders

Governmental entities, be they data producers, data publishers or data consumers.

Problem statement

Within governments, it is frequently important to document the legal authority under which data are:

• Collected
• Retained or destroyed
• Distributed

Currently, DCATv3 lacks a way to formally represent this. Needed are attributes for:

• CollectionAuthority
• RetentionAuthority
• DistributionAuthority

Also needed is an ontology to describe legal authorities. Within the United States such authorities can be a specific law, a regulation, an administrative procedure, a legal precedent, or a constitutional authority, an executive order, or some other legal instrument. Although the temptation is to make the authorities a free-formed text field, it may be better to attempt more specificity.

Existing approaches

Largely this is not formally tracked by most data producers or consumers, but is tracked with a variety of informal mechanisms.

Links

Requirements

• It would be useful to be able to cite a specific authority, and to distinguish between "unknown," "no existing authority," and other missing data conditions.
• RPIF, https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/76

Related use cases

UC13

Comments

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[dr-shorthair]

Could this use the same qualifiedAttribution mechanism also mentioned here?

[simsong]

It could use qualifiedAttribution, but we would need to have multiple qualifiedAttributions per catalog entry, and we would need to have more vocabulary for distinguishing each kind of of the attribution, and we would need to have a way of distinguishing attributions to people and attributions to legal documents or concepts.

[dr-shorthair]

we would need to have multiple qualifiedAttributions per catalog entry

Sure. Why not?

we would need to have more vocabulary for distinguishing each kind of of the attribution

Of course. But they would likely be governed outside of DCAT - i.e. community level, not DCAT schema level.

Attributions are always to Agents or Parties.

[riccardoAlbertoni]

I think @dr-shorthair's suggestion combining qualified attribution and externally-governed vocabularies provides a solution to this issue.

I also concur that defining a vocabulary for legal authorities is at the moment out the scope of DCAT being rather community-specific.

@simsong: Is it ok if we close this issue?