During discussion with stakeholders, the following additional property was proposed:
‘Statistical population’ as a property for Dataset.
This property is intended to provide information defined in the EURO-SDMX Metadata Structure (ESMS) as the “total membership or population or "universe" of a defined class of people, objects or events”. According to the ESMS guideline the property should “describe the target statistical population (one or more) which the data set refers to, i.e. the population about which information is to be sought”. The expected value for this property is text.
Participants in this activity are asked to respond to the following questions:
1. Is the information for this property available in existing statistical systems and applications?
2. How will exposing this information to general data portals enhance the discoverability of statistical datasets?
3. Do you know of any property in existing RDF vocabularies that could hold this information?
Comments
The WG decided in the meeting of 13 May 2016 to discuss this issue further. One suggestion that was made at the meeting was to possibly create a property on a higher level, with a possible name "Additional details concerning statistical concepts" that could include the ESMS elements Statistical concepts and definitions, Statistical unit and Statistical population. See for ESMS the link in the description of tthe issue above.
The property would be optional and repeatable, and expressed as text.
This proposal also covers issue https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/151271/.
We are soliciting opinions and comments from the community on this proposal.
The property schema:population, defiend as "Any characteristics of the population used in the study, e.g. 'males under 65'." sounds like exactly what is needed.
On the other hand, schema:population is not in the schema.org core vocabulary, but in the Health and Lifesciences Extension (the domain appears to be MedicalStudy). It is one of the candidates for generalization, though.
Proposed resolution: Use schema.org property schema:population; text with optional language tag.
A comment has been received that the expression of the statistical population could also be considered in the context of a future more elaborate approach to the expression of quality aspects. If that is a shared view in the working group, we would postpone this issue to a later time.
The proposed property was not accepted, and no further action was taken.