On 6/8/2010 10:20 AM, Ross Singer wrote: > I think it's important to note here, that in RDF, you are -not- > confined to one schema.
No. That RDF was designed as a schema aggregator, and as a way to avoid DTD constraints, is a given. The important issues are: 1. Having aggregated as many different schemas as you need, does the resultant set completely express /all/ the data held by OL for any given record? and, 2. Does the schema set selected represent the most commonly used labels for the greatest number of consumers? In the movie, _The Hunt for Red October_, there is a scene where Jack Ryan asks Skip Tyler, the submarine expert, "Can you launch a missile from a horizontal tube?" Skip's response is, "Sure. Why would you want to?" That second question is the one I'm trying to ask. Sure you can use FOAF to represent a person (or an agent, which is more general), but why would you want to? The question is not rhetorical. It may be that FOAF is indeed the best choice for one of an author's names, but until we've looked at the "why," we don't know. Just because you /can/ do something doesn't mean you /should/. > 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). This is the assertion I am seeking evidence for. /Is/ FOAF well-established? According to Mr. Summers, the BBC is publishing RDF which includes some FOAF so we now have one data point, although we don't yet know who besides the BBC itself is consuming that data. /Is/ it extremely common? Who besides the BBC consumes it? /Do/ most agents that are looking for biographical information know how to parse it? Which are they? Are there agents looking for biographical information that use other vocabularies? Which are they, and which vocabulary do they use? What are the alternatives to FOAF? How common are they? Which is the most expressive, and the most precise? Now this is probably a very small tempest in a relatively large teapot. The fact is that it probably doesn't matter which vocabulary is chosen, so long as the aggregated vocabulary is complete for the OL data set, because /every/ consumer is probably going to have to do some kind of transformation on the data before it is usable to him/her. If you look at the "RDF" record for an OL work, you will see that it is not RDF at all, but simply XML using the Open Library namespace. Personally, I find that just as good as anything, and much more likely to be complete. I just get a little rankled when I see people apparently jumping from band-wagon to band-wagon without stopping to ask where the wagon is headed. _______________________________________________ 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]
