Proposal for relaxing domain of dcat:contactPoint

[andrea-perego]

From: #76 (comment)

This proposal is about relaxing the domain of dcat:contactPoint, to allow its use not only for datasets (as it is in the current version of DCAT), but also for other resources (e.g., catalogues, catalogue records).

This issue popped up during the development of GeoDCAT-AP, since all the agent roles (dcat:contactPoint included) supported in ISO 19115 can be specified for any resource.

Besides this, the "contact point" is probably the most important role for data consumers, not only for datasets. For instance, for a dcat:Catalog it is possible to specify the dct:publisher, but if I need to ask questions and/or report issues about the catalogue I need to get in touch with the publisher's dedicated contact point.

[dr-shorthair]

Also, is the range right? While vcard:Kind is an RDF encoding of a commonly used contact data structure, there are other options ...

[makxdekkers]

I agree that the use of only vCard for contact information is too restrictive. If the range were :ContactInformation, vCard could be one possible expression of that class, while allowing other ways of specifying contact details.
I have seen cases where implementers use dcat:contacPoint to refer to resources of class Agent, but I think that would not be desirable.

[dr-shorthair]

Proposal accepted https://www.w3.org/2018/02/07-dxwgdcat-minutes
Partially implemented in PR #97
Document needs to be updated to match https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/blob/gh-pages/dcat/index.html

[dr-shorthair]

Document also updated. Resolved by #97