Thanks Ivan and thank you, Leigh.
What I like about Leigh's suggestion is that it gives a way to associate
a string like "ISO/IEC 5218:2004" with a URI and I can show that as a
generalised guidance note without necessarily saying "use one of these
controlled vocabularies that we don't control and that you may not
like". So I think the way is fairly clear:
If there is a suitable controlled vocabulary (and in the particular use
case I'm referring to there is - SDMX) - then use it;
If you can construct a suitable datatype URI then use that (The HL7
terms have OIDs which can be given as a stable URI from a look up service)
If you can't do these things - and you really can't sensibly with PDFs
on a portal, perhaps behind a paywall, then Leigh's method is the way to
go. However... as always, we should look for other instances where this
has been done so we don't invent lots of URIs for the same datatype and
then have to fall back on loads of owl:sameAs assertions.
OWL data ranges look nice but it's not the kind of thing most public
administrations will want to get into.
Incidentally, I did contact Norman Paskin at DOI who sent me a positive
reply. DOIs for ISO standards are not ruled out and it has been
discussed, especially in the context of CrossRef, but, as ever, it's
complicated.
Phil.
On 04/04/2012 13:13, Ivan Herman wrote:
Phil,
Reading Leigh's mail and his reference to the XML Schema datatypes and RDF
document: I wonder whether a possible way forward would not be to define your
own datatypes as derived datatypes from good-old xsd datatypes, but using the
OWL 2 facilities:
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Data_Ranges
My understanding is that you would need datatypes with a very restricted set of
possible values; these can be described using these OWL 2 features. The
advantage is that you can then mint the URI-s you want for those and, with a
bit of luck, some OWL environment can handle them (which is probably not the
case if you use those ISO datatypes in RDF, for example). Of course, as Leigh
said, you can also define those datatypes in XML Schema, but I would not expect
OWL reasoners to handle those.
B.t.w., by OWL reasoner I do not necessarily mean something very complex. My
overly simple (and inefficient:-) OWL RL environment:
http://www.ivan-herman.net/Misc/2008/owlrl/
also handle some of the simpler cases...
Just an idea
Ivan
On Apr 4, 2012, at 10:30 , Leigh Dodds wrote:
(apologies if this is a re-post, I don't think it made it through y'day)
Hi
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:29 PM, Dave Reynolds<[email protected]> wrote:
On 03/04/12 16:38, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
On 12-04-03 02:33 PM, Phil Archer wrote:
I'm hoping for a bit of advice and rather than talk in the usual generic
terms I'll use the actual example I'm working on.
I want to define the best way to record a person's sex (this is related
to the W3C GLD WG's forthcoming spec on describing a Person [1]). To
encourage interoperability, we want people to use a controlled
vocabulary and there are several that cover this topic.
...
Perhaps I'm looking at your problem the wrong way, but have you looked
at the SDMX Concepts:
http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/code#sex
-Sarven
I was going to suggest that :)
+1. A custom datatype doesn't seem correct in this case. Treating
gender as a category/classification captures both the essence that
there's more than one category& that people may differ in how they
would assign classifications.
I wrote a bit about Custom Datatypes here:
http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/custom-datatype.html
This use case aside, there ought to be more information to guide
people towards how to do this correctly.
See also:
http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-xsch-datatypes/
Cheers,
L.
----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf
--
Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/
http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1
