The request brings up four separate issues:
- It is not clear to implementers which organisation should be considered the one that makes the asset available in a case where there is a chain of aggregators.
- It is not clear at which organisation level the publisher should be identified, e.g. on department level or on a higher institutional level.
- The publisher is now defined as an organisation which does not allow individuals to be publishers of Assets.
- There is now way to indicate the owner of an asset.
Discussion:
For issue 1, a distinction needs to be made between the Agent that makes the Asset (the data) available and Agents that aggregate, index and make available the descriptions of the Asset (the metadata). In ADMS and in DCAT-AP, the publisher of an Asset or Dataset is the data publisher, not the metadata publisher. So in the example provided (i.e. what publisher should have an asset published by DIGIT.B6 of the EC among DG DIGIT, DG DIGIT.B6, or the EC), an Asset hosted on Joinup would have the European Commission as publisher while an Asset hosted elsewhere would have the hosting organisation as the publisher.
For issue 2, there is not much advice that the Application Profile can give, as the organisational structure and the formal responsibilities may vary across organisations. In general, the advice may be to select the highest level of responsibility, e.g. the level in the organisation that could be individually sued.
For issue 3, the restriction in the current ADMS-AP that publishers should be organisations is not necessary. The class foaf:Agent includes organisations, groups and persons. However, the question may be asked whether Joinup will harvest metadata for Assets that are published by individuals? If so, the usage note could be modified.
For issue 4, a reference can be made to the discussion of Agent roles in section 7 of the DCAT-AP. The working group involved in the DCAT-AP revision discussed this at length and came to the conclusion that ‘quick-and-dirty’ solutions may have unwanted side-effects; for example, using dct:creator for the role of owner will be confusing for outsiders and the roles of creator and owner may not always coincide.
Comments
Proposed resolution:
Comment from Szabolcs Szekacs
I suggest to rename it to owner.
Ownership is much clearer and relates to licencing. It is also much more important than who actually published the software / standard.
Publication is also overlapping with the repository.
Suggest to have 1. owner attribute, which shows who is the owner of the asset (from a legal perspective).
2. keep the repository information
There are some issues to conisder around the property 'owner':
1. it has turned out in earlier discussions for ADMS that it is not always clear who the 'owner' in the legal sense of an asset is; it is usually much clearer who the publisher is, and the publisher assumes a certain type of responsibility.
2. there is not always a direct relationship between ownership of an asset and the ownership of licensing rights. Dublin Core has a property dct:rightsHolder for this.
3. it is not entirely clear whether indicating both the owner and the publisher helps discoverability of assets
4. in the discussion around the revision of DCAT-AP it was noted that there is no well-known metadata specification that has a property for 'owner', and the use of a property like dct:creator would make things worse by implying that there is always a coincidence of creation and ownership.
I think we could keep the publisher, but change the usage note to make it much more detailed and clear.
@Szabolcs, what do you think, based on Makx's comment?
Can you provide a suggestion for a clearer usage note?
@Thiabout @Makx
Max, thx for the clartification. Can support the solution proposed in #1.
PWC (thibaut) can provide a suggestion for a clearer usage note.
The publisher shall be always the organisation (individual) which publishes the solution to the public. It should be always at the highest level possible (e.g. for all commission solutions, it is not DIGIT.B6, neither DIGIT.B or DIGIT, but European Commission).
We will add text in the usage note that "the publisher is the Agent that publishes the data, not the Agent that publishes the metadata". We will include this in the draft version of the revised profile. Of course, further comments are welcome.
Makx, as ADMS is not used for publishing only data, I would suggest a slide change in the usage note:
"The publisher is the Agent that publishes the asset or solutions, not the Agent that publishes the metadata about it".
Hi all,
we discussed this point during our monthy progress report. We agree with the latest usage note from Nikos.