Re: VIAF contributor model

I'm wondering if you've been thinking beyond the immediate term and to 
the point when RDA and FRAD may be available, and whether, given that 
these are optimized for the kind of library data you're talking about 
(which neither FOAF nor SKOS are, IMO), it might be well to consider 
those issues as well?

FRAD can be seen here: http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/24.html
RDA can be seen here: http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm

[And yes, the RDA vocabularies resolve, the IFLA ones do not (yet).]

Diane

On 10/28/10 5:21 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote:
>
> The VIAF RDF is badly in need of an update. For example, VIAF has a 
> bad habit of assuming that “clusters” automatically map to “Person”. 
> Upgrading it to recognize the reality of “Organization”  and perhaps a 
> few others shouldn’t be too hard, but there are other issues worth 
> considering.
>
> After closer inspection, it looks like the VIAF ontology 
> <http://viaf.org/ontology/1.1/> reinvents some key aspects of SKOS. It 
> would be nice to start factoring out these misalignments ASAP. This 
> group’s input on the possibilities would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Background: VIAF started out using foaf:Person for its “real world 
> objects”, switched to skos:Concept, and was starting to wobble back to 
> foaf:Person. At that point, the decision was made to identify both for 
> the sake of argument:
>
> http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412/#foaf:Person
>
> http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412/#skos:Concept
>
> It was far from clear at the time whether both made sense, separate 
> identity was necessary, or what property should be used to connect them.
>
> At the F2F, Martin Malmsten (who is involved with contributions to 
> VIAF via SELIBR) pointed out the new foaf:focus element that seems to 
> do a very good job of rationalizing for the connection.
>
> http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_focus
>
> Like VIAF, SELIBR also coins URIs for foaf:Person and skos:Concept and 
> this seems like a good model for other contributors and VIAF itself to 
> follow.
>
> I’m also inclined to believe that skos:ConceptScheme should be used to 
> differentiate different “sources” in VIAF. This could and probably 
> should be done regardless of whether the contributors understand or 
> publish SKOS themselves. The attached UML is intended to show how this 
> could be conceptualized. This presumably requires some explanation, 
> but hopefully a picture is worth a thousand words.
>
> I’m also pretty convinced that the 
> http://viaf.org/ontology/1.1/#Heading class needs to be bound to 
> skosxl:Label class in some way (rdfs:subClassOf?). I don’t think it 
> can completely go away, though, because of inconvenient restrictions 
> on the skosxsl:prefLabel and skosxl:altLabel.
>
> Thoughts or questions?
>
> Jeff
>
> ---
>
> Jeffrey A. Young
> Software Architect
> OCLC Research, Mail Code 410
> OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
> 6565 Kilgour Place
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>
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>

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2010 21:49:15 UTC