Re: [foaf-protocols] WebID test suite

Hey Henry,

Just to chip in here:—

> Here is an ldap entry taken from wikipedia 
> dn: cn=John Doe,dc=example,dc=com
>  cn: John Doe
>  givenName: John
>  sn: Doe
>  telephoneNumber: +1 888 555 6789
>  telephoneNumber: +1 888 555 1232
>  mail: 
> john@example.com
> 
>  manager: cn=Barbara Doe,dc=example,dc=com
>  objectClass: inetOrgPerson
>  objectClass: organizationalPerson
>  objectClass: person
>  objectClass: top
> 
> 
> It is an attribute value pair system, without namespacing, and so is designed for client server interaction, not for linked data interaction. You need to tie those into a global namespacing. Not impossible, but you have a lot of work on your hands to get all the others to 1. understand why it is important (because they are living in closed worlds, and don't see what they are missing) and 2. Get an agreement world wide on how to do this.

It does have namespacing: what you're seeing above is a textual representation of an entry in LDIF format. The attribute names there are generated based on the schema held in the LDAP server, while the raw data uses OIDs for the classes and attributes instead. A given OID arc is a pretty reasonable parallel to a URI namespace. For example, all of the attributes from Sun's NIS+ LDAP schema live under one particular arc (except for references to other schemata), and so on and so forth.

A fun project for somebody one day would be to run a web service on a well-known URI which spat out RDFS/OWL/whatever for the objectClasses and attributes at a particular OID. Would be a nice extension to Harald Alvestrand’s OID browser… [e.g., http://www.alvestrand.no/objectid/2.5.html]

M.

-- 
Mo McRoberts - Data Analyst - Digital Public Space,
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Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 19:32:55 UTC