RE: API for RDF: locutor

A very interesting point. I think you have identified another in a whole
universe of issues RDF doesn't explicitly address, which has to do with
querying and manipulation of RDF objects. RDF does provide the
infrastructure to support statements about statements, so there is no
problem creating an RDF object that identifies the locutor of the statements
in question. But there must be some system/API/protocol in place to enforce
the presence and accessibility of such meta-statements.
 
Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean-Marc Vanel [mailto:jmvanel@free.fr]
Sent: Monday, March 06, 2000 11:43 PM
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org; Jean Marc VANEL
Subject: API for RDF: locutor


David Megginson <david@megginson.com> write on 2000-02-25 : 

Unfortunately, it's not about triples.  The only way to discover the 
true RDF data model is to reverse-engineer it from the XML, and it 
turns out that there are at least six components (not three) in each 
statement: 

  subject 
  subjectType (global id, local id, URI pattern) 
  predicate 
  object 
  objectType (literal text, literal XML markup, reference) 
  objectLang 


These are not simply syntactic artifacts -- it's information that 
*must* be exposed through any RDF API ...

There's yet another very important item that is implicit in any RDF set of
descriptions: it's the locutor. I mean by locutor the individual or
organisation who makes these descriptions. But we don't have direct access
to the locutor, except by a possible dc:Creator property. But in turn a
dc:Creator property points to a name, possibly not unique, or to a mail
adress or home page, possibly obsolete. This subject on the identity,
uniqueness, persistence of a resource could take us far away... The obvious
design solution is that the locutor IS the URL (not URI here!) where our RDF
set of descriptions appears in. 

So if a Web site S1 says about someone: 


<looks>ugly</looks> 


And another Web site S2 says about the same person: 


<looks>handsome</looks> 


My RDF application can decide, with a knowledge of which of locutors  S1 and
S2 is trusted most. 
  


-- 
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      making botany available on Internet 
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Received on Tuesday, 7 March 2000 14:41:31 UTC