SWED design question(s)

Dave, other SWEDers,

One more SWED question. I'd like, per rough notes in 
http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2004/09/23/2004-09-23.html#1095929014.190278
to be able to merge the DOAP and SWED descriptions of the FOAF project. 

It isn't really an opensource software project, nor a classic
Environmental project, but it has aspects that can be partially
described with these two sets of conventions.

http://www.foaf-project.org/doap.rdf
http://www.swed.org.uk/swed_data_entry/rdfit/TheFOAFProject.rdf

I'd like to be able to meet scenarios such as:

	'find the doap:mailing list of all things that have 
	a swed:has_topic of swed_toi:information_resource_discovery'.

...which would require either consensus on project URIs, or merging
based on OWL semantics, most likely InverseFunctionalProperty. FOAF and
DOAP have foaf:homepage and doap:homepage (which are close enough to
be linked using rdfs:subPropertyOf). SWED uses a string representation
of the homepage (or 'primary URL', which I'm taking to be much the same
thing).

 <swed:has_primary_url>http://www.foaf-project.org/</swed:has_primary_url>

This takes us into the realm of N3 (and grungy areas of it, such as
representing URIs in string form), so I fear it may currently be hard
for an RDFS and OWL-subset based SemWeb crawler to do the data merging
needed to service my query.

Would you consider changing things, eg. by also emitting a foaf:homepage
or swed:homepage property that is resource-valued? (if the latter,
relating it to foaf:homepage would also be appreciated, when you do the
schema).

Another thing to consider is that because you've used plain literals,
they'll only compare identical when they have the same xml:lang, which
might also be an obstacle to loosly-coupled data merging. This bites us
in FOAF slightly with the mbox_sha1sum property, btw. In that case I can
live with it, since putting mbox hashes into URI space seems odd. But
for things that are defined to be URIs, a more RDF-friendly idiom would
be to represent them as such within the graph.

I like btw the ability to go back and revise the SWED file via Web
forms, and suspect that having simple string values might be associated
with that...

Thanks for any thoughts,

Dan

Received on Thursday, 23 September 2004 11:26:50 UTC