On Jul 30, 2009, at 11:28 AM, Bill Roberts wrote:
Suppose I want to say something like:
The total rainfall in Edinburgh in 2006 was 600mm.
There are various ways to do it, but I'd probably go for something
like this in pseudo-RDF
Edinburgh hasMeasuredProperty _b
_b measureOf "Annual Rainfall"
_b period "2006"
_b rdf:value "600"
_b unit "mm"
(with some xsd data types added in).
The same general pattern applies to population of a country, or
sales of a product etc. I'd expect this pattern of data to appear
very frequently, but found it surprisingly difficult to find similar
examples on the web (other than in the RDF Primer! - and the
GoodRelations ontology does this kind of thing for
PriceSpecification).
Right, SWeb practice hasn't quite caught up with this level of
sophistication on a large scale yet, though this kind of approach is
commonplace in legacy KRep systems. Also there is widespread prejudice
against the use of bnodes in this way, but OTOH people don't want to
have to coin a large number of URIs either, a combination which tends
to produce paralysis. Also further, the OWL in RDF encodings used
rdf:collection syntax much more than this bnode-star-cluster kind of
structure, and that seems to have set a fashion.
BTW, you might want to rethink some of this. Its not a good idea to
have the units and value separated like that, because if someone wants
to put a measure in inches, you are in trouble. Better to have a
separate quantity node with the units/value pair attached. Also, you
might want to consider something a bit more structured than just
'period', since there's nothing to indicate that its the total for
this period that you are considering. It does get a bit complicated
quite quickly, unfortunately.
Can anyone suggest good ontologies/vocabularies I should consider
in areas like socio-economic data, physical properties, weather,
earth science that support this type of structure?
I think you can use this style with many vocabularies, in fact.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab SWEET ontologies seem relevant and are
very comprehensive, if rather sparsely documented (http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/ontology/
). Anyone used those in anger?
I know they have been used, yes. NOt by me, but Im sure by others. And
they are very well maintained and professional.
Pat Hayes
Thanks for any tips
Bill
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