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

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com> wrote:
> On 10 August 2010 09:12, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>> +cc: Leigh
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu> wrote:
>>> 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".

>> Thanks for the feedback. It seems that words are like Internet domain
>> names; all the good ones are taken!
>
> I wasn't aware of that usage. I can see how it might be confusing to
> that specific community.
>
> I agree with Dan's comments around "references" and similar naming:
> that situation is already murky, so best not to make it worse. I also
> don't really think that referencing/referring captures the intent as
> well as "focus".
...
> Likewise, until now I had seen focus as relatively unused and unburdened.

Thanks to Simon for digging out the citation - I also hadn't seen that usage.

"1. The focus, i.e. the noun component that identifies the general
class of concepts to which the term as a whole refers."

That is pretty close territory, and in fact might answer one open
question I had w.r.t. foaf:focus which is how to deal with a
skos:Concept that relates more to a class than an individual. If we
allowed it to point from a SKOS concept prefLabel'd “Hospitals for
children” to an RDFS/OWL class which was the set of things that are
“hospitals”, we might have something acceptably close to established
usage.  ( “indexes” in the phrase term “Printed indexes”, from the
IFLA doc also works, while "band" in "broadband" is an example I find
baffling).

However there is no escaping the overlap, and the terminological
partial-match at least deserves to be acknowledged in the spec. I
don't know if the idea of a concept that matches a single specific
entity fits with their notion of 'focus'; it might just be a different
use, or [worse] a direct conflict.

I'm also connected over wobbly 3G so my searching powers are a bit
limited, but if we're going to switch (and 'standsFor' seems the best
current candidate, thanks Antoine) it'd probably be best to do so in
the next week. My gut instinct however is to stay with foaf:focus if
we can characterise it in terms that acknowledge some relationship to
prior usage.

> Is there scope to leave foaf:focus in FOAF and explore a more general
> term for inclusion as part of SKOS. One might end up superceding the
> other if successful.

Yes. One reason I wanted this in FOAF is that getting a W3C group
through to REC can take a lot of time and money, but it would ideally
be something handled "in house" by future editions of SKOS.

That said, I don't want to tread on terminological toes here. If
foaf:focus will really confuse and upset things, now's the time to
change. I'll try to read around a bit more to get a sense for whether
things can be made to fit.

cheers

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 10 August 2010 13:35:57 UTC