I think it's important to note here, that in RDF, you are -not- confined to one schema.
So for an author, you can use FOAF for the properties that FOAF covers (since it's a well-established vocabulary, extremely common and most agents that are looking for biographical information would know how to parse it), most importantly, foaf:name (and, for OL, probably foaf:homepage and foaf:page). So, for: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A.rdf You could have something like looks more like: <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf='http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#' xmlns:rdfs='http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#' xmlns:bibo='http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/' xmlns:rdg2='http://RDVocab.info/elementsG2/' xmlns:dcterms='http://purl.org/dc/terms/' xmlns:foaf='http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/' xmlns:owl='http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#' xmlns:ov='http://open.vocab.org/terms/' > <foaf:Person rdf:about="http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A";> <foaf:name>Margaret Mahy</foaf:name> <rdg2:variantNameForThePerson>Mahy, Margaret</rdg2:variantNameForThePerson> <rdg2:biographicalInformation>Margaret Mahy ONZ (born in Whakatane, New Zealand on 21 March 1936) is a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. She has written a little less than 50 novels, including the recent Alchemy in 2002. Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics.</rdg2:biographicalInformation> <rdg2:dateOfBirth>21 March 1936</rdg2:dateOfBirth> <foaf:page resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mahy"; /> <owl:sameAs resource="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Margaret_Mahy"; /> <dcterms:identifier>/authors/OL31800A</dcterms:identifier> <dcterms:provenance resource="http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A#meta"; /> </foaf:Person> <dcterms:ProvenanceStatement about="http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A#meta";> <dcterms:modified>2010-04-12 12:42:10.448987</dcterms:modified> <dcterms:created>2008-04-01T03:28:50.625462</dcterms:created> <foaf:page resource="http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A/Margaret_Mahy?m=history"; /> <ov:versionnumber>5</ov:versionnumber> </dcterms:ProvenanceStatement> </rdf:RDF> Just as a strawman. -Ross. On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Lee Passey <[email protected]> wrote: > On 6/7/2010 12:12 PM, Ed Summers wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Lee Passey<[email protected]> wrote: >>> So before any questions about how best to represent a person in RDF can >>> be addressed, you should try to find out who will be consuming the data, >>> and what their expectations are. >> >> I think this is an important point, and is largely why I'm in favor of >> leveraging existing vocabularies for people (foaf) in the rdf views, >> so that ol authors fit into the existing ecosystem of rdf data about >> people, some of whom happen to have written books. > > Can you give us a better description of this "ecosystem?" What existing, > or in-development, applications would consume OL data? What would they > use it for? It seems to me that the proposed preference for FOAF, with > its accompanying incompleteness, is mostly speculative at this point; > that is, /if/ OL provided data using the FOAF vocabulary, and /if/ > future applications had a use for OL data /then/ something useful could > happen. But what if the predicates never materialize? > > Thus the question, "what applications currently exist or are likely to > exist imminently, that desire to consume OL data, and what are their > requirements?" Until this gating question is answered, at least > provisionally, any attempts to decide on an RDF vocabulary is premature. > On the other hand, if there are no current or imminent applications, > then it seems to me the answers to the vocabulary selection question > are: 1. pick anything you want, because no one will be using it anyway, > and 2. why are you wasting developer time on an effort for which there > is no demand? > > On the third hand, XSLT is a powerful enough scripting language that > transformations from any arbitrary XML vocabulary, even non-RDF > vocabularies, to any other XML vocabulary, are trivial. Simply pick or > invent an XML vocabulary that encodes all of the data stored in the OL > record sets. When someone comes to you and asks for a different transfer > encoding, simply hand him/her the XSLT script that transforms the OL > encoding to whatever the target encoding needs to be (or if demand is > great enough, run the XSLT on the server side via a Java servlet); of > course, you won't know what the target encoding needs to be until > someone comes to you and asks for it. > > The key here is that the XML encoding /must/ carry /all/ of the data > currently stored in the OL record sets, which is something that the > current RDF API does not do. In my opinion, completeness trumps > conformance to any particular vocabulary. > _______________________________________________ > Ol-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
