Use/Align with EU location vocabularies

[coolharsh55]

The concepts from DPV-LEGAL regarding locations (e.g. nations), memberships, their corresponding ISO 3166 codes are already provided with multi-language labels by the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) under a Open Data Commons Attribution License. This is more comprehensive than the one in DPV-LEGAL, and contains other information regarding the locations. However, it is not up to date, as evidenced by UK still being depicted as a member of EU.

Suggestion: declare relation between DPV-LEGAL and TGN, e.g. skos:exactMatch, and provide information about TGN on the DPV-LEGAL page.

[bertvannuffelen]

W.r.t. EU controlled vocabularies: refer to https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/authority-tables (and Eurostat).

For EU (and EU Member State) administrations, these are normative. If official administrative data would be required to be provided these will be imposed.

[coolharsh55]

Hi. Yes - this is a good suggestion (for authoritative EU vocab). Thank you. Do you know if these represent EU membership, and where the current UK and adequacy situations are?

It would be great if we have an external resource that defines countries / regions (and keeps them updated), so that DPV can focus on linking the information (e.g. authorities, laws) and only add what is missing (e.g. adequacy decisions).

[bertvannuffelen]

@coolharsh55

The corporate-body encodes the EU and its agencies.
e.g.
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/concept/-/resource?uri=http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/corporate-body/EUMS27_1

The NAL Country covers the countries: exact the same content as is DPV-Legal, with EU managed persistent URIs.

https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/dataset/-/resource?uri=http://publications.europa.eu/resource/dataset/country

[coolharsh55]

This is great! Thanks for finding and suggesting. I don't know why I didn't realise eurovoc should have already had this. We will discuss removing the duplicate terms (countries and EU membership) from dpv-legal and keeping the rest.

I know that for laws, the EU publications office has identifiers for each publication that state whether they are in force, etc. but AFAIK no relation to locations or authorities. Same for adequacy decisions. So if that is still the case, then that's what dpv-legal should retain.

[rigow]

Normally, I would expect those to have a namespace as the Commission and the Publication Office are deep into RDF. So we could just make an open connector to this, because NIST and BST etc will have their own taxonomies.

[coolharsh55]

@rigow Hi! Yes, they have RDF & IRIs. I did not understand what you meant by "open connector", could you please elaborate? My earlier comment was that we can remove the DPV duplicate concepts and just use the EU ones? The NIST and BST etc. will have to be mapped anyway - so instead of DPV, now they will map to EUVOC?

[coolharsh55]

We discussed this in DPVCG meeting SEP-28, and agreed to remove the duplicate concepts from DPV and use the EUVoc ones instead since they are authoritative. Minutes - https://www.w3.org/2022/09/28-dpvcg-minutes.html

[coolharsh55]

I went through the EU vocabularies (authority tables, thesauri, taxonomy) and there are a lot of IRIs for concepts that can be reused in DPV-LEGAL, including Country and Places, but there are several things missing. We can provide these as a wrapper on top of EUvocs (and other vocabularies) in the future. See below for a summary, with the full set at https://harshp.com/dev/dpv/notes-reuse-euvoc.

Specific tasks we can do include providing hasLaw GDPR, hasAuthority <some DPA> relationships, and vice-versa using these IRIs. Also providing all the various EU relationships within a single graph (which is what DPV-LEGAL is currently), including the inverse associations.

• EUvocs provide an IRI for countries and memberships
• EUvocs provide IRIs for places (region, city) and their status as being within the Country which is then linked to being in EU (jurisdiction)
• The UN vocabs provide bidirectional regional association (City <–> Country)
• MISSING: an association from place/country to membership, but not vice-versa
• MISSING: a single graph containing all pertinent information about countries, places, and memberships
• CELEX and other metadata provide information about laws (title, dates, topics)
• MISSING: association of areas with applicable areas e.g. GDPR is applicable for EU, countries, regions, and so on
• MISSING: authorities (e.g. Data Protection Authority) type and their association with specific laws and jurisdictions
• There are other vocabularies that DPV can reuse / consider alignment (see notes for concepts and links)

Ideally, all this should be contributed back to the Publications Office and including in that list, but I have no idea what additional work is needed, or how to do integrate this back into the current vocabs.

[coolharsh55]

More references I've looked at:

• https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/iso:code:3166:IE is the ISO page for Ireland; regions are mentioned on page but don't have a URI
• https://www.omg.org/spec/LCC/ has both countries and regions and also UN M49, but the URIs are long alphanumeroc strings and not intuitive (e.g. /IE)
• Other vocabularies visible at https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/terms?q=ISO%20639&type=property&page=1 e.g. DBPedia, Genealogy, Geonames, etc. - none model what we exactly want.
• Potential issue with using EU vocabularies (as outlined in the comment above this), is the larger question on why we use specific EU vocabularies (for non-EU use-cases), and the complexity in getting all the EU terms for adopters.

IMHO what we can do next: we continue using existing DPV terms, e.g. https://w3id.org/dpv/dpv-legal#IE, but we make it explicit that this is temporary and we're looking to change this to something more authoritative in the future. Our focus is on providing the data on laws, authorities, memberships (this can be a copy of EU vocab terms in a single file OR reuse their URIs).

Aside, while we do the above, we should ask EU Publications Office and/or SEMIC if there is value in them providing this data given that it is commonly required in all use-cases.

[JonathanBowker]

The NosLegal Taxonomy has a mature Locations Dictionary which maybe useful. It also contains memberships and treaties which might also be useful. I can introduce you to the team managing NosLegal if that will help.

[coolharsh55]

Hi. Thanks, NosLegal looks good, though two issues with NosLegal taxonomy: (1) Its not 'authoritative' in the sense that EU vocabs or SEMIC or OMG or ISO is. (2) No RDF serialisation (easily fixed, so minor issue). Separate from these, NosLegal is a limited company - so there is uncertainty how it will be maintained on an ongoing basis and in long-term. We should prefer authoritative and (known to be) well-maintained sources for the purposes of this work.

[coolharsh55]

Update from today's meeting https://www.w3.org/2022/12/14-dpvcg-minutes.html - we will add a note regarding uncertainty of vocabulary, turn the spec into a guidance for using other authoritative vocabularies (starting with EU vocabs), and provide only the additional information relevant for DPVCG's scope, i.e. laws and authorities. So the 'contribution' of DPV-Legal would be to guide how to use authoritative vocabularies, provide datasets for ease of use, tables for reference, and only add missing concepts with the intention to suggest their standardisation in appropriate initiatives.

[ghurlbot]

Comment by @coolharsh55 via IRC channel #dpvcg on irc.w3.org

this was discussed in today's meeting with consensus to drop alignment with EUVOC and continue with DPV-LEGAL modelling of jurisdictions and other information, and to ask for help in aligning it with other vocabularies. The issue will remain open for discussion and continued contribution.

[ghurlbot]

Comment by @coolharsh55 via IRC channel #dpvcg on irc.w3.org

the group agreed in today's meeting to continue with DPV's modelling of location

[coolharsh55]

The DPV locations are now associated with EU Voc locations - see https://w3id.org/dpv/loc#vocab where the table provides links to ISO and EU Voc pages for each country. These links are only present in the table. They should be added to RDF with skos:exactMatch

[coolharsh55]

To review and close this issue, see -

1. https://w3id.org/dpv/loc - list of locations with links to ISO and EU vocabulary
2. https://w3id.org/dpv/legal - list of laws, authorities, etc.