Need advice on using same URI for SKOS and FOAF descriptions

I'm currently working on a project that involves producing SKOS and FOAF for a person.  The current proposal has the RDF looking like:

<rdf:RDF>
  <foaf:Person rdf:about="urn:person:1">
    <foaf:name>person 1</foaf:name>
    <dc:date>1995</dc:date>
  </foaf:Person>
  <skos:Concept rdf:about="urn:person:1">
    <skos:prefLabel>person 1</skos:prefLabel>
    <dc:date>1996</dc:date>
  </skos:Concept>
</rdf:RDF>

I'm a little concerned looking at this.  The same URI is being used for foaf:Person and skos:Concept.  If this gets dumpped into a triple store, urn:person:1 will be both of rdf:type foaf:Person and skos:Concept, what would this mean or imply?  I thought, somewhere in my OWL reading, that it was discouraged for a resource to have multiple rdf:type, but I cannot find where I read this now.

The properties for foaf:Person and skos:Concept are also going to be dumpped together, which might be acceptable, but what happens when the same property exists in both the definition of foaf:Person and skos:Concept with different values, like dc:date?  How can someone tell that the dc:date "1995" came from foaf:Person description rather than the skos:Concept description to maybe decide which one is correct?  What if I wanted to write a SPARQL query to return only the foaf:Person description?

Do I need to make foaf:Person and skos:Concept disjoint, like:

<rdf:Description rdf:about="foaf:Person">
  <owl:disjointWith rdf:resource="skos:Concept" />
</rdf:Description>

FYI, I used the URN URIs for understanding the issue, the actual project is going to be using HTTP URIs.

	
Thanks, Andy.

Received on Thursday, 3 December 2009 23:17:49 UTC