It is not clear what the definition of Excluded Classes is (section 6.3 draft 0.09), neither the criteria to "exclude" certain classes. In particular, what are the differences between Optional and Excluded classes? Is the use of Excluded classes somehow "prohibited" under the DCAT AP? What is the purpose of "excluding" certain clasess?
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The specification contains an explanation in section 5:
Excluded class: a receiver is not obliged to handle information for that class; a sender must not provide it.
In Draft 2, the only Excluded class that is defined in DCAT is Catalog record.
Then it looks like in fact we are "deprecating" somehow the use of elements in other vocabularies by "forbidding" their use. I think that this is a bad practise and probably against general RDF etiquette. Whatever AP shouldn't ban the use of any element in the original vocabulary.
e.g. I am producing DCAT according to DCAT specification that already includes some elements currently excluded in the AP, but I also want to comply with the ISA DCAT AP. Do that means that I need to produce two different DCAT serializations? I shouldn't. Any AP should be fully compatible with the original vocabulary.
My suggestion is to redefine Excluded as: "A receiver is not obliged to handle information for that class; a sender may provide it." So the sender can produce full DCAT but the receiver is free to ignore the excluded parts.
In response to a use case contributed at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/discussion/enable-syndication-dataset-metadata#comment-14246, which describes a possible use for catalogue records, I am proposing to change the class CatalogRecord to optional instead of excluded. This would also take care of the issue brought up by Carlos.
Included in draft 3.