open-civic-data.json

{
	category : "category_name", // Required Single category from (http://opencivicdata.com/#categories-wg)
	meta : { // Optional: Simple Dublin Core Metadata Element Set
		title : "",
		creator : "",
		subject : "",
		description : "",
		publisher : "",
		contributor : "",
		date : "",
		type : "",
		format : "OpenCivicData.org",
		identifier : "",
		source : "",
		language : "",
		relation : "",
		coverage : "",
		rights : ""
	}
	geometry : {}, // Optional Geojson location feature (http://geojson.org/geojson-spec.html)
        // any other optional properties may follow. These may include both common and shared properties
        // from (http://opencivicdata.com/#properties-wg). some illustrative examples:
        historic: true|false, // if the object is considered historic
        last_maintenance_date: RFC3339DateTime,
        manufacturer: "ACME Corp.",
        starts_at: RFC3339DateTime, // for events such as road closures or live music
        ends_at: RFC3339DateTime
}

I am very interested in keeping things as simple as possible for this spec. Namespaces get cumbersome very quickly

I agree that simplicity is key for acceptance. though I can imagine something like a civicopendata namespace, a community driven spec to propose and encourage re-use of commonly used properties.

updated gist to have link to opencivicdata.org in the DC metadata. this way the data can 'breadcrumb' back to OCD to encourage discovery of commonly used properties. there are probably better ways to do this, but my point is that instead of bloating every key we can just have a reference in the data itself to the OCD standard

+1 for reusing common properties! I begin to talk about property over lap here: https://gist.github.com/825314#gistcomment-20955

I'm not sure how to structure a system to engender that though.

Maybe there should be an additional Meta Document spec that has dataset-wide metadata such as the DC meta properties

90% of the data I'm dealing with has data-set-level metadata. object-level metadata properties are rare, but possible, and typically override data-set-level metadata properties.

Could you give examples of the difference between dataset level metadata and object level metadata just so I am clear on where the line is?

E.g. our bike facilities layer.

dataset datasource: MAPC
some trails are based on DOT or town data, so they would have different datasource entries on the object.

ODbL http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ was developed to enable databases with different licenses on an object level for instance.