Re: vCard RDF compromises

Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>
> On Jun 26, 2007, at 5:38 PM, Garret Wilson wrote:
>
>> N.familyName, N.givenName, N.honorificPrefix, and N.honorificSuffix 
>> are all single value properties, although you can have multiple of them.
>
> Maybe I'm being dense, what does the last bit above mean? If they're 
> "single-value" how can one then "have multiple of them"?

Sorry, Bruce; I was using my terminology very loosely. Of course RDF 
values can *only* be "single-value", which is the root of the problem we 
were discussing. By "single-value" I meant "a value that is not 
rdf:List". Put more correctly, the properties N.familyName, N.givenName, 
N.honorificPrefix, and N.honorificSuffix can each appear more than once 
for any subject, but none can have a value of rdf:List.

To put this into context, the above compromise addresses the following 
issue: vCard allows (for example) multiple N.familyName values with 
significant order. We could put all the family names as an N.familyName 
rdf:List, but that would be overkill and bulky for the common situation 
of a single family name. We could combine all the values into a single 
N.familyName literal but that would lose semantics. Splitting them out 
into different occurrences of N.familyName would lose the ordering. The 
above compromise is meant to address the most common situation while 
allowing applications to keep track of multiple ordered names through 
the use of the N.additionalNames rdf:List property if they so desire.

Garret

Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2007 16:15:26 UTC