Re: Quick comment from new SKOS user

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 07:35:23AM -0500, Dan Brickley wrote:
> Some RDF vocabs do go down this route, with 'hasAge', 'hasName',
> 'hasHomepage' instead of 'age', 'name', 'homepage'. While
> backwards-named properties like 'subClassOf' complicate the picture,
> I prefer to have simple property names. I think an analogy with OO
> class/property models is appropriate here (it isn't always, with RDF).
> In Java, a Person class might have 'age', 'name', 'homepage' as fields 
> or bean properties. Similarly in other objects. The fact that the 
> property is attached to some object is enough to suggest the implicit 
> 'has'. Unfortunately, 'has-subClassOf' doesn't quite work, raising 
> intuitions that the thing referenced is a sub-, rather than super- 
> class of the subject resource. 
> 
> If we can minimise the deployment of 'isXYZof' properties, we can
> hopefully get away without having to prefix everything else with
> 'has'. Perhaps... :)

Dan,

I agree about backwards-named properties, though it isn't
immediately obvious to me how one might rename a property
such as http://purl.org/dc/terms/isPartOf -- hasWhole?
Maybe that's what you mean by just "minimising" such names,
i.e., not avoiding them altogether.

But I would argue that "hasAge" is more helpful than just
"age". I suspect it is not obvious to alot of ordinary users
that a property attached to an object is to be understood
with an implicit "has".  The extra verb underlines the HASA
relationship (as opposed to ISA).  A property named "whole"
would sound even more mysterious than "hasWhole"...

Tom

-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker                        Thomas.Baker@izb.fraunhofer.de
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Received on Monday, 10 January 2005 12:08:06 UTC