Re: Difference between dc:subject and foaf:topic

It isn't clear from that explanation what the difference is, since unless you
talk about the domain and range of foaf:topic it's hard to understand how
there is any.

The fact that foaf:topic has a defined domain of foaf:Document and a range of
rdf:Resource means that it's a bit more restricted than dc:subject which can
happily live with a literal value, but there doesn't seem to be much else
that can be used to pick between them (on my reading of the two sets of
specifications).

If I was trying to define the way I see the web I would write somewhere that
foaf:topic seems to me like a subProperty of dc:subject. Being a believer in
living language, and in language as an attempt to provide identifiers for
concepts in such a way thhat we are convinced we mean the same thing, this
doesn't strike me as a bad thing to do. But since we are inventing RDF
vocabulary creation, it is something I would treat with care - especially
while we don't yet have good methods for dealing with conflicting statements,
including conflicting statements about how vocaublaries are defined.

cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Libby Miller wrote:

>On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Miles, AJ (Alistair)  wrote:
>
>>
>> Can anyone tell me what's the fundamental difference between these two
>> properties?
>
>see a message from Dan to the foaf list:
>
>http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/2003-February/011064.html
>
>[[
>I want to note a critical difference between foaf:topic and dc:subject.
>The former realtes a document to the thing that it is about; the latter
>relates it to a subject code that in some other formalism is taken as
>standing for that thing.
>]]

Received on Friday, 12 March 2004 11:34:01 UTC