Re: Use case: Find the email address of "John Smith"

On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 09:03, Seaborne, Andy wrote:
> == Task
> 
> A user wants to find the email address for a person whose name is "John
> Smith".  The user has an address book in RDF that contains all the
> information needed.  The address book uses the FOAF vocabulary [1].

This looks fine to me. Since it got some support last week, I'm
inclined to regard silence at this point as agreement from
most members of the WG.

Anybody who doesn't like this will please let us know, preferably
before I send out the agenda on Wednesday for Thursday's teleconference.

One or two more like this and it will be time to build an outline
of the document and start to flesh it out, yes?

Hmm... one shortcoming I can see is that it doesn't explictly
identify a requirement. Hmm... another imperfection is: we already
have LDAP; ideally our use cases should show why the existing
technologies are not enough. Perhaps a query like "find the
email address of the person in <picture23.jpg>" would be more
compelling?


> == Importance of DAWG
> 
> A query is more efficient in terms of application programmer time than
> writing custom code to a lower level interface.  The resulting execution can
> be more efficient because an application might choose a simple way of doing
> it where as a toolkit can invest in optimization.
> 
> If the query is issued to a remote data source then a way of serialising one
> or more operations requests is needed.  A query language is one way of
> providing this.
> 
> Applications that use the DAWG rec. can be switched from a local address
> book to an interface to an LDAP server (say) with no change to the
> application other than pointing it to a different source.
> 
> Information sources that use the DAWG rec. can be accessed by a wider set of
> applications with no extra work.
> 
> == Other
> 
> The query has two parts - locate the resource and extract some information
> from that resource.  The presentation of the results is the mailbox email
> address.  As people may have several mailboxes, there can be multiple
> results even if the conceptual task is to find one.
> 
> The resource for the person could be a bnode or a labelled resource.
> 
> An example query:
> 
> SELECT ?mbox
> WHERE
>   (?x foaf:name "John Smith")
>   (?x foaf:mbox ?mbox)
> USING
>   foaf  FOR <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
> 
> -------
> 
> [1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
>     FOAF namespace document
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
see you at the WWW2004 in NY 17-22 May?

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2004 16:36:24 UTC