Re: FOAF spec revised - addtion of foaf:focus, a skos extension linking topical and factual information

Hi Dan

Although I loved foaf:focus at first sight because of the convergence
metaphor (see http://blog.hubjects.com/2010/03/foaf-focus.html) I would tend
to follow Simon's argument.
Maybe I miss something, but are not we speaking about referent here, in the
semiotic sense.

So why not foaf:referent ?

Bernard

2010/8/9 Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu>

> Dan-
>
> can i suggest using a different word  than focus, as this is term of art in
> controlled vocabularies. It is used when referring to modified/specialized
> "terms".
>
> Possible labels that might work could be  isReferredToBy ; SKOS concepts
> are intentional-with-a-t, so reference is a natural label;
> isFoafProxyForIntentionReferencedBySKOSConcept is awful ComputerDeutch.
>
> Foaf person "Paul The Octopus" isReferredTo by SKOS Concept "#PTO1".
>
> Where "#PTO1" isSubjectOf "#document" "Decideabity and tractablity of
> logical inference with binary serial octacles".
>
> (The halting problem has time complexity PTO(1) but other tasks may require
> an infinite series of questions.)
>
> On Aug 9, 2010 8:19 AM, "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
> Hi SKOS folks
>
> http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
> http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20100809.html#term_focus
>
> Just to let you know, there's a revision of the FOAF specification
> today. It includes a new term, foaf:focus that links a skos:Concept to
> the thing that the concept stands for.
>
> This notion has been discussed many times here over the years,
> sometimes as "skos:it", but never made it into W3C's REC-track SKOS
> spec. FOAF has long contained a cluster of topic-oriented properties
> (topic/page, primaryTopic), and in FOAF we have a long-standing
> concern with describing the areas of interest and expertise for people
> and other agents (eg. organizations, groups, projects). The addition
> of foaf:topic is intended as a modest and pragmatic bridge between
> SKOS-based descriptions of topics, and other more entity-centric RDF
> descriptions. When a SKOS Concept stands for a person or agent, FOAF
> and its extensions are directly applicable; however we expect
> foaf:focus to also be used with places, events and other identifiable
> entities that are covered both by SKOS vocabularies as well as by
> factual datasets like wikipedia/dbpedia and Freebase.
>
> Other relevant changes: the overview of FOAF at the top of the spec
> now more clearly separates two informal sub-sets of FOAF terms: "Core
> FOAF" terms and "Social Web" terms. The distinction is made with
> regard to whether a term is useful in describing someone or something
> who lived before the Web / internet. Only the more universal
> characteristics of groups, people etc are considered 'core FOAF';
> things like 'homepage', 'openid', 'weblog' are in the "Social Web"
> layer. Previously, we mistakenly gave the impression that FOAF was
> only for describing modern-day online accounts; hopefully the new
> formulation more accurately conveys an interest in capturing
> historical information too. There have also been some other textual
> changes that attempt to indicate more clearly what we're attempting
> with FOAF - essentially the combination of social and informational
> networks.
>
> Re the "Core" subset, brief excerpt: "Core - These classes and
> properties form the core of FOAF. They describe characteristics of
> people and social groups that are independent of time and technology;
> as such they can be used to describe basic information about people in
> present day, historical, cultural heritage and digital library
> contexts. In addition to various characteristics of people, FOAF
> defines classes for Project, Organization and Group as other kinds of
> agent."
>
> Also, various older terms (used in early demonstrations and
> prototypes, plus some spelling variations) are now marked 'archaic',
> both in human and machine-readable documentation.
>
> Feedback on the current design and description are welcome, either
> here or on the foaf-dev list. My hope is that with foaf:focus we can
> begin today gathering real-world implentation experience and data that
> could inform any future revisions to SKOS itself. If W3C were to
> eventually charter and complete an effort to update SKOS with matching
> functionality to foaf:focus, we would of course update FOAF
> accordingly to indicate the new mechanism. In the meantime, foaf:focus
> is available for use, experimentation and collaboration. I hope it
> proves useful when linking topically structured and factually based
> RDF information.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> ps. one thing the spec currently lacks is an example of the new
> property. I'm waiting on this point, as several people are working on
> related datasets, and I hope soon we'll have real-world examples to
> illustrate foaf:focus's usage.
>
>


-- 
Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Vocabulary & Data Engineering
Tel:       +33 (0) 971 488 459
Mail:     bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
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