Re: Vocabulary = Questionnaire ?

Sounds like a brilliant idea to me

Especially thinking googledocs, which allow me to build a form and export
the data
enterd in csv, that can easily be converted to RDF

Would be happy to help develop this approach and test if and how it works
in various fields, for example, not only gov folks

Let me know if and how can I help

PDM

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>