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

On 2/22/2015 12:31, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>
> 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.

Karen, could you clarify what is the "therefore" of this dicussion for 
you? It sounds like you are saying that the notion of Shapes helps 
people differentiate metadata records from the things that the metadata 
describes. Assuming you want to employ some formalism for that, why not 
just use some other metaclass such as :MetadataClass, instead of plain 
rdfs:Class? Or a flag ":metadata true" on those classes, or use a naming 
convention to have :Book and :BookMetadata, or a property :about that 
links metadata with its RWO, or whatever. At least everything remains a 
class.

What is metadata for you may be data for someone else. Building a 
parallel universe takes away that flexibility.

Holger

Received on Sunday, 22 February 2015 23:01:58 UTC