Re: VIAF contributor model

Quoting Ross Singer <ross.singer@talis.com>:

> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 6:31 AM, Haffner, Alexander <A.Haffner@d-nb.de> wrote:
>
>> However, back to the formats I don’t want to discuss J foaf doesn’t have the
>> power to reflect our comprehensive data – I thought we want to make this
>> high quality data available for the public –if so we should have a closer
>> look modeling the data in FRBRer, FRAD and/or RDA in parallel to the SKOS
>> representation.
>>
> I keep seeing this statement getting made: "FOAF/SKOS are not
> expressive enough for our data" and I'm simply not buying it.
>
> Can somebody please back up this claim?  FOAF defines personal and
> organizational entities.  SKOS defines concepts.
>
> Those are exactly the things we're describing.

Ross, at a class level you are right. But if you look at the  
properties defined by foaf and the properties used in FRAD, there is  
virtually no overlap. So I think when people make that claim, they are  
talking about available properties, not classes.

FRAD has about 10 classes and 132 properties[1]. Almost none of the  
properties are in foaf. There are also differences: FRAD has name as a  
class, foaf has name as a property.

Dan offers to add to foaf, but as Diane and I warned in our blog posts  
[2] it's not so much a question of adding terms but how to manage the  
vocabulary-building process. FRAD comes out of a slow process that  
affects tens of thousands of institutions. My advice to Dan is: you  
don't want that process stepping on the light-footedness of foaf.

kc

[1] http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/24.html
[2] http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/search/label/FOAF  or
http://managemetadata.org/blog/2010/09/


>
> -Ross.
>
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 14:12:12 UTC