Re: frad:Person and foaf:Person

Karen wrote:
>There is no 'things in the world' concept in library cataloging in the
>sense that there is in SemWeb.

I think it's helpful to think of "things in the world" in
the SemWeb context not as real things in the real world,
but as things in a notional world about which one wants to
make statements -- as MichaelP put it [1]:

    I would argue that OWL (like any ontology language)
    is used to create _a world_ (the universe or domain)
    one is trying to make assertions about, rather than just
    taking _the world_ as the default domain.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/2010Sep/0007.html

Karen wrote:
> > Perhaps I don't understand the difference between SKOS and Skosxl, but my
> > reading of the use of labels for both of those is that you are providing the
> > label for *something*. In authority data, the authoritative name (the MARC
> > 1XX) *is* the thing. At least, that seems to be what FRAD is saying.

So when modeled in an ontology or concept scheme, the
authoritative name (the MARC 1XX) _would_ be a "thing in
the world".

Dan wrote:
> My understanding of SKOS vs SKOSXL is just that in XL the content of
> the label is itself a first class thing. Which can be useful when you
> want to say other things about the label. So in this case it would
> give a kind of double-indirection in that with this FRAD/MARC stuff we
> are also applying the label to a thing that stands for a person's
> name.
> 
> So we'd potentially have
> 1. the person as a thing
> 2. the person's name as a thing
> 3. the label for the person's name as a thing (if using skosxl:)

To be clear, I understand this to mean:

    1. the person as thing is an instance of foaf:Person
    2. the person's name as thing is an instance of skos:Concept
    3. the label for the person's name as thing is an instance of skos:Label

...where #2 and #3 are part of the authority scheme, and
where #2 may be related to #1 using foaf:focus.

Tom

-- 
Thomas Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 14:52:00 UTC