Vocabulary = Questionnaire ?

I like to think of RDF vocabularies as questionnaires, where each RDF
property is a simple question.  I think this approach makes RDF much
less mysterious, and my hypothesis is that it will allow people without
much specialized training to understand and even create pretty good
vocabularies. This seems like a pretty obvious way to approach RDF, but
I haven't seen other people, software, or documentation using it, nor
have a I see a metadata vocabulary to support it.  

The main thing I'm looking for is two properties for linking RDF
properties to text which presents the property as a question.  I think
it's good to have two properties, because usually you want a short form
of a question, and then some longer explanatory text.

For example, I'm picturing:

   foaf:name rq:short "What is the name of this person or entity?";
             rq:details """This is the full name, a sequence of 
                        characters by which this entity is generally
   known, with the parts (like firstname and 
                        lastname) in the order used for normal
   presentation (not sorting order)."""

Additional metadata like example values (with explanations), and
importance/salience could be nice, too.  My biggest question is about
diction: "What is its name?" vs "What is the name?" vs "What is the
full, common name", vs as above.  I think it will take an effort to
present many different kinds of vocabularies to many different
populations to understand the best ways to phrase the questions.   (But
I think any of these options is still pretty good.)

Where properties are questions, classes used for domains are things the
questions are about, and classes used for ranges constrain the answers
and lead to more detailed questions about items provided as answers.

So, has anyone made progress in this direction, and I've missed it?
Alternatively, does anyone have evidence of shortcomings of this
approach?

To clarify and motivate slightly: my immediate interest is to help
people in government work with RDF vocabularies.  My guess is they're
pretty familiar with filling out forms, and sometimes even designing
them.   I feel like we need to meet them on their own ground, instead
trying to teach them to use protégé or something.

     -- Sandro

Received on Sunday, 24 October 2010 13:19:11 UTC