Yes, this is something that we do with the CIDOC CRM ontology. Biographical records are a major part of cultural heritage and humanities work (e.g. museum biographical records, prosopography, etc) and therefore this is perhaps more developed than more general ontologies. CIDOC CRM is event based making the assignments of period natural whether specific or ranges of time - as you would expect.
A marriage is considered a Group to which people (Actors) are former or current members. The roles can be specified (wife/husband, etc.). The marriage itself is an event that Actors would have participated in for which a time-span can be assigned. Using this type of modelling any type of relationship can be modeled including family relationships, work relationships and so on. There is some information about this at http://edd.uio.no/artiklar/DH2014/C-E_Ore_prosopography.pdf The CRM reference is at http://www.cidoc-crm.org/docs/cidoc_crm_version_5.1.2.pdf A primer explaining underlying principles is at http://www.cidoc-crm.org/docs/CRMPrimer_v1.1.pdf Dominic ________________________________ From: Hugh Glaser <[email protected]> To: Frans Knibbe | Geodan <[email protected]> Cc: W3C LOD Mailing List <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, October 13, 2014 1:24 PM Subject: Re: How to model valid time of resource properties? (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
