Re: frad:Person and foaf:Person

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Richard Light

> Maybe it's not so different.  Another way of looking at this is to say that
> the library world has been doing for decades what the Linked Data initiative
> is now trying to do - creating identities which are unique and hopefully
> both shared and persistent within a given community - just using a different
> mechanism.  Creating an identity for an author, e.g. by adding birth and
> death dates to their name, is a slightly artificial exercise with exactly
> the same purpose as minting a LD URL for that author.

In fact the earlier (2000-2005) usage of FOAF was closer to this
descriptive library model than to current LOD idioms. We made much
heavier use of "reference by description" techniques, since the RDF
and Web Architecture specs of that era were unclear as to whether we
could give HTTP-based URIs to real world entities, whether RDF could
understand multiple URIs for the same entity, etc. And OWL hadn't
defined owl:sameAs. So early FOAF deployment (eg. see
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/talks/xml2003/all.htm ) was based
around mentioning people (as 'blank nodes' in RDF) then describing as
many of their distinguishing properties as possible, to indicate who
they were in a way that allowed things to be linked up later. So for
example I'd write FOAF to say "here is a photo of the person whose
personal email address is richard@light.demon.co.uk", or "this is the
homepage of the person whose homepage is ...". Other forms of
description, eg. multiple properties (place of birth etc) fit right
into this strategy. It has value, but it is also harder to compute
with.

The original Linked Data note at
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html was a gentle critique
of this idiom, basically saying "give the people http URIs too!". And
we did!

I still have some concerns about the practice of declaring URIs for
other people, especially living (non-technical!) ones, unless they are
given some clear 'right of reply' if the associated descriptions are
inaccurate. But in the general case there's no doubt that the Linked
Data emphasis on URIs everywhere was a leap forward; data merging
based on identifying properties is a huge pain. If we can get a URI
for each node, a lot of things become simpler.

cheers,

Dan

ps. somewhat related aside - how long before govts start assigning
URIs at birth?

http://blog.jclark.com/2007/12/thai-personal-names.html

" Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use
of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people
in Thailand with the same family name are related. [...]
If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family
name.  Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone.
[...]
I've never come across a situation where two living Thais share the
same given name and family name. "

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 10:03:22 UTC