Incorrect use of the dct:conformsTo property? (+Possible solution) about fairdatapoint HOT 1 OPEN

Hi Bas, thank for reaching out. This issue bothered me since we started the development of the FDP, some 6 years ago. My issue was that it was not clear to me whether the DCAT class represent the "thing" or the metadata record of the "thing". If it would be the "thing", then where can we have some properties of the metadata record? E.g., a dataset may have been created by John but the metadata record of that dataset may have been created by Mary. To address that in a very quick and dirty way we have predicates like metadataIssued, metadataModified, etc. But I was never happy with this solution as they mix properties of two different entities in the same block.

Recently, as I was writing a paper describing the current status of the FDP this issue came back to my mind and I felt the need to solve it. I already discussed the solution with the team and we will add to the upcoming Sprint. In summary we will assume that the DCAT classes refer to the target object and we create another type of class named MetadataRecord that points to the object using the predicate isMetadataOf (as per FAIR principle F3). In this way the class MetadataRecord contains the properties of the metadata record of the object such as the author, date of creation, data of last modification, etc. while the properties of the object (e.g., dcat:Catalog, dcat:Dataset or any sub-class of cat:Resource) are expressed in the object block, under its own identifier. Something like:

<metadataRecordIdentifier> a fdp-o:MetadataRecord;
	fdp-o:isMetadataOf fdp:app;
	dct:description "This is the metadata record of the my dataset."@en;
	dct:license <http://rdflicense.appspot.com/rdflicense/cc-by-nc-nd3.0>;
	dct:identifier fdp:app/metadatarecord;
	dct:issued "2022-02-15T09:09:40.929Z"^^xsd:dateTime;
	dct:modified "2022-02-15T09:09:40.929Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
	dct:conformsTo <MetadataRecordProfileURI> .

<datasetIdentifier> a dcat:Dataset;
	fdp-o:hasMetadata <metadataRecordIdentifier> ;
	dct:title "My dataset"@en;
	dct:description "My test dataset."@en;
	dct:language <http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1/en>;
	dct:license <http://rdflicense.appspot.com/rdflicense/cc-by-nc-nd4.0>;
        dct:conformsTo <DatasetProfileURI>.

Regarding the conformsTo, we have contacted the DCAT editors on how to properly use it. They instructed us that the conformsTo predicate should point to a profile and, in that profile we can point to, for instance, a schema. Since our intention in the FDP is to have every metadata record to inform which schema it conforms to for, among other reasons, validation, we inform in the profile that the schema (in SHACL) is used with the validation role.

from fairdatapoint.