RE: [MODS] Mark Twain Rides Again (was Re: [MODS] MADS/RDF for review)

Dan,

 

Could you elaborate on making names first class things in FOAF? It’s not clear how this would be preferable to using SKOSXL. For example, this would be legitimate:

 

ex:person1 a foaf:Person ;

                skosxl:prefLabel ex:label1 .

ex:label1 a skosxl:Label ;

                skosxl:literalForm “Dan Brickley” .

 

Note that the domain of skoxsl:prefLabel is unspecified and thus does not entail skos:Concept.

 

I think the umbel:isLike that Antoine suggested is a plausible solution for your “likelySameAs”:

 

http://www.umbel.org/vocabulary#isLike%20Property (Note you will need to scroll up since the anchor is below the property spec.)

 

As I noted in my last message, though, I’m not 100% convinced that umbel:isLike is appropriate for reconciling (1) (2) and (3) for the reasons given there.

 

Jeff

 

From: public-lld-request@w3.org [mailto:public-lld-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dan Brickley
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2011 9:27 AM
To: Antoine Isaac
Cc: Metadata Object Description Schema List; public-lld
Subject: Re: [MODS] Mark Twain Rides Again (was Re: [MODS] MADS/RDF for review)

 

(sorry, resending from better address)

On 3 January 2011 15:26, Dan Brickley <danbri2011@danbri.org> wrote:

On 3 January 2011 13:58, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:

 Hi Simon,
 
 I'll be quick, as I've not so much though about it--probably the owners of FOAF and VIAF have more insight...
 I'd say that for (1) (2) and (3) there's nothing against creating 3 instances of foaf:Person, and connecting the mads:Authorities (or skos:Concepts directly, in the VIAF approach) to them using foaf:focus.

 

Sounds plausible to me, though I'm missing a bit of context. I'm still tempted to throw a 'names as first class things' into the next FOAF revision btw; those use cases keep cropping up.

 

Re fantasy/fictional organizations, I'd say that's fine FOAF-wise. We put the 'fictional is OK' note in the foaf:Person documentation but really that's a bit silly; it belongs more in the high level overview.

 

Imagine if your natural language dictionary had a little footnote against every term ("you can use this term when saying things that aren't strictly, literally true"). Pretty redundant! Same goes for RDF perhaps. Certainly the fact that people write descriptions (a) that go out of date (b) that are true of the world at different times, ... that's very common. I wouldn't want to say that -say- an instance of foaf:Group representing [some part of] Enron  is considered a poor use of RDF/FOAF simply because the thing is no longer existing. Temporal logic is a can of words, so best to leave some wiggle room and not be strict about "must exist!", since the natural response then is "when must they exist?". And RDF tries to pretend time and change don't need to be represented, so even answering is hard to do precisely.

 

 Now comes the issue of gluing the foaf:Persons together. We're still missing a standard co-reference mapping link (softer than owl:sameAs) for this; perhaps umbel:isLike [1] can be used.
 I'd be much more confident about expressing the relation at the level of mads:Authorities/skos:Concepts, using skos:exactMatch -- or skos:closeMatch, depending on your feelings (or AACR2's) regarding ghosts :-)

 

Is there anything like a 'likelySameAs' property yet that can be truely asserted of some pair X, Y in the following cases:

 

i) X and Y are the self-same, single thing

ii) X and Y are different things, but close enough in the descriptions at hand that they could be mistaken for a single thing

iii) nobody really knows, but (i) or (ii) seem very probably

 

Many of the 'similar' or 'near' properties I've seen don't appear applicable to (i), ie. to assert X nearlyBla Y implies X is a different individual from Y. I'm interested more in the case where we might have 1 entity, we might have 2, nobody is quite sure. I don't believe that situation has a property yet, but I could be wrong. 

 

cheers,

 

Dan

 

 Antoine
 
 [1] http://www.umbel.org/vocabulary#isLike%20Property

 
 

 [Antoine - I'm adding public-lld to the cc list for this message, since there was some discussion dealing with linking VIAF records to real-world-objects].
 
 It's interesting to consider the relationship between:
 
 *(1) Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 *
 LCCN: n 79021164
 VIAF rdf: http://viaf.org/viaf/50566653/rdf.xml

 
 *(2) Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 1835-1910 *
 LCCN: n 93099439
 VIAF rdf: http://viaf.org/viaf/53367783/rdf.xml

 
 *(3) Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 (Spirit)*
 LCCN: n 82045653
 VIAF rdf: http://viaf.org/viaf/106965116/rdf.xml

 
 [Since VIAF make use of UMBEL, I will use UMBEL/Cyc as a reference]

   1. All three of these Thing <http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvViA9JwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA> can be used to make assertions/claims about the Literary Identity of the creator of a ConceptualWork <http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rwClAZJwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA>.

 
   2. Assertions of authorship made using the three different Things state different propositions.

   3. (1) and (2) both correspond to names used by the same MaieHuman <http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvVjWoZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA>, they represent distinct Literary identities. Authorship attributions using (1) and (2) represent claims that the creation of the intellectual content of the work and the creation of the first tangible form of the work were both done by that MaleHuman <http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvVjWoZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA>.
   4. Authorship attributions using (1) and (3) represent claims that that the intellectual content of the work was produced by the same MaleHuman <http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvVjWoZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA> as in (1) and (2), but that the creation took place after his death, and that a different person created the first tangible form of the work. This person is given as an added entry.

 
   5. Statements made using (3) are not believed to be true in consensual reality.

   6. There is a specific rule for this is in the AACR 2. I am not making this up :-)
   7. FOAF allows for non-existing Persons, so ghosts can be foaf:Person. This allows Fictional characters and non Christian deities to be represented as "Names" not "Subjects".
   8. FOAF does not specifically allow for non-existent Corporate bodies or Groups. This requires fictional entities of this type to be handled separately (Ministry of Magic; Miskatonic University; etc.)
 
 Simon

 
 
 On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl <mailto:aisaac@few.vu.nl>> wrote:
 
    Hello Bruce,
 
    Would it alleviate your concern if you could use something like foaf:focus [1] to link instances of mads:Authority to instances of foaf:Person?
    This is what VIAF does (e.g., [2]), and there's nothing in the the current design of MADS/RDF that forbids it, since mads:Authority is a sub-class of skos:Concept.
 
    Best,
 
    Antoine
 
    [1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_focus

    [2] http://viaf.org/viaf/24604287/rdf.xml

 
 
 
        I've been away from this since my flaming away. Just wanted to chime
        in on Rob's points ...

        On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Rob Styles<rob.styles@talis.com <mailto:rob.styles@talis.com>> wrote:
 
            Hi all, my 2 pence worth...
 
            Not a regular here, joining you specifically for the MADS/RDF discussion.
 
            ** Comments so far
            Some of the comments so far are a tad harsh. It's great to see LoC
            doing this stuff even if it's not exactly as one might have approached
            it. They know their data, maybe we should try to be a bit more
            supportive?
 
 
        Fair enough. But I do think we need to meet each other half way
        ("their data" is also "our data" in my view), and I think your
        comments are helpful (definitely more than mine) towards that end.
 
            ** Conceptual approach
            I've worked with library data for a long time and it's not simple
            stuff. A common first mistake is often to assume that something like
            the name authority talks about people and organisations when in fact
	           it talks about "bibliographic entities" — the names printed in books,
	           mostly.
	
	
        Yes, I get this sort of indirection. But as an author of some of those
        bibliographic items, I'm still a person. And there needs to be a way
        to bring these two perspectives together. Concretely, if I have a
        description of Samuel Clemens in FOAF, I really want to know how to
        link that to some description of his pen persona/alter ego Mark Twain.
 
            These have been modelled and re-modelled over many years and authority
            data has evolved to meet specific needs. It is not an ideal starting
            point for publishing Linked Data.
 
            However, I think authority data could be approached differently to
            MADS/RDF. Where MADS/RDF uses bibliographic terms, many of which come
            from the record structures employed, I would prefer to see real-world
            terminology used. So, a class of "Name" would be a good thing to have,
            then we can talk about names. Where it is possible to identify a real
            person it would be good to use a class of Person (ideally the foaf
            one) and where we know the name is a pseudonym it would be great to
            have a Pseudonym class too. The current MADS/RDF approach remodels the
            authority /record/ where it may be preferable to model the authority
            /data/.
 
 
        To me, this (natural language terms, rather than jargon) would go a
        long way towards resolving some of my impulsive reaction against what
        I was seeing.
 
            The downside to that approach is that it can make round-tripping
            between the syntaxes harder. Consider round-tripping MARC and MARC/XML
            as compared with MARC and Dublin-Core XML?
 
 
        So this really comes down to what the priorities are for this effort?
        Is it absolutely clean round-tripping with legacy data, or is it to
        bring library data into the linked data world? Obviously one can try
        to do both, but there's some clear tension here.
 
            I would look again at anywhere you have a structure word such as
            /element/, /list/ or value as they are likely to be describing a
            record rather than describing things from the world.
 
 
        Right.
 
        I guess in the end, I'd really like the designers behind this effort
        to imagine that people other than library people might also want to
        use these data in the end, and to imagine how that might work.
 
        Imagine a case where some developer somewhere is writing some simple
        PHP application and wants to store some bibliographic data, but also
        wants to be able to link into some LoC SPARQL endpoint to enhance it.
        How would they do that? How would they know how to get what kinds of
        data, to present it how to their users?
 
        Right now, MADS RDF seems to me to be only intelligible to someone
        with a library degree, or with an awful lot of free time on their
        hands.
 
        And I agree, BTW, with Karen's suggestion that it makes sense to treat
        MADS (or insert other library representation) name representations (I
        don't, personas?) as distinct from foaf:Agent or foaf:Person, but to
        enable them to be linked.
 
        [snip]
 
        Bruce