(Warning: I’m no expert in this.) I think the sort of thing you are talking about has been a serious part of Museums and Archeology etc. for a long time. They have quite a bit of experience of this.
The CIDOC-CRM, which can be represented in RDF (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/official_release_cidoc.html ) has a whole way of doing this, centred around E2 Temporal Entity. I know ResearchSpace (http://www.researchspace.org ) uses this, and I’m sure Dominic, Barry and the team would be pleased to advise about doing all this in anger :-) Of course, this may be overkill for you, and it would be simpler to use quads ;-) Best Hugh > On 13 Oct 2014, at 12:54, Frans Knibbe | Geodan <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hello! > I wonder if a way of recording changes in properties of resources can be > recommended. Many resources in real life have properties that have a time > range of being valid. In some datasets, only the current (or most recent) > state of a resource is stored, but in many cases it is important to keep > track of the history of development of a resource. > An example: > :john_smith > a foaf:person ; > foaf:name "John Smith" ; > Let's say that on 2013-09-27 John Smith marries Betty Jones. John Smith is > still the same person, so it makes sense to extend the same resource, not > create a new version: > :john_smith > a foaf:person ; > foaf:name “John Smith” ; > ex:marriedTo :betty_jones ; > How could I efficiently express the fact that the statement :john_smith > ex:marriedTo :betty_jones is valid from 2013-09-27? And if the couple > divorces, that the property has expired after a certain date? It would be > nice if the way of modelling makes it easy to request the most recent state > of a resource, any historical state, or a list of changes during a time > period. > A quick web scan on the subject revealed some interesting research papers, > but as far as I can tell all solutions need extensions of RDF and/or SPARQL > to work. > Perhaps this question is really about the ability to make statements about a > triple? Which is a problem for which no satisfactory solution has been found > yet? > Regards, > Frans > > Frans Knibbe > Geodan > President Kennedylaan 1 > 1079 MB Amsterdam (NL) > > T +31 (0)20 - 5711 347 > E [email protected] > www.geodan.nl | disclaimer -- Hugh Glaser 20 Portchester Rise Eastleigh SO50 4QS Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155, Home: +44 23 8061 5652
