Re: "shape" as a relationship, not a class

On 2/21/15 4:51 PM, Irene Polikoff wrote:
> It is very common for database records to have fields for, let's say, person's name, birthdate, the date they received the driver license on and so on and the 'created by', 'created on', 'modified by', 'modified on' fields. The latter fields are understood as 'data management' information. It is about the data, not about Alice. This has been supported by systems forever, yet I don't believe there has been a need to create another ID to make this distinction apparent.

No, we didn't create different identifiers for those bits of 
information, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do so now. In the 
past, the data I worked with was record-based, and identifiers weren't 
heavily used. Even if we had understood the concept, we did not have a 
way to identify the metadata and the metadata subject differently 
because we hadn't considered it an issue at the time.

With linked data, it is indeed an issue. We have situations today where 
we cannot tell the difference between the identifier for the metadata 
and the identifier for the thing the metadata describes. This didn't 
matter when we were do very little with our metadata other than creating 
displays for humans, but as soon as we contemplated linking between 
various data stores, this came back to bite us. It's something we are 
definitely struggling with, actively, at the moment. In practice, the 
difference matters.

kc
-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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Received on Sunday, 22 February 2015 02:31:59 UTC