Referencing FOAF

Dear all,

 

There was a short discussion in the GLD call two weeks ago
(http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/meeting/2012-12-06) about referring to other
people's vocabularies. Here are some of my thoughts on this issue.

 

In earlier work that I was involved in, this issue has come up a couple
of times. From those discussions, I remember three potential strategies:

 

1.       Re-use existing vocabularies irrespective of how they were
developed and who is responsible for them. This has the advantage of
maximum re-use, but of course the risk of using stuff that will
disappear or be modified in uncontrolled ways, making your instance data
invalid or undefined. 

 

2.       Re-use existing vocabularies that are somehow deemed to be
"good", e.g. well-defined, well-maintained or owned by a trusted entity.
For this, you need a set of criteria that determine what is "good" and
what is not. This could be purely a set of local criteria, but you might
also consider a set of globally accepted criteria. One of the ideas that
I've heard was that there could be a Community of Vocabulary Owners that
would agree on good practice in the form of a common set of maintenance
and persistence policies, which could include the kind of commitments
like the one between DCMI and FOAF
(http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-foaf/). The advantage is that you
would have some level of confidence that the vocabularies involved in
this community would not disappear or break; the disadvantage is that
such an approach takes time and effort in consensus building.

 

3.       Don't directly re-use anything, but create parallel classes and
properties in your own namespace with appropriate sameAs or subClass and
subProperty declarations referring to other vocabularies as the
alternative to re-use. I've heard the argument "Our project/service is
going to be around longer than <fill in an organisation that maintains a
vocabulary>" to argue for this approach. The advantage is that you're
not dependent on someone else's policies or credibility, but I don't
think it will help the wider objectives of Linked Data. You're moving
the pain to the consumers who will need to resolve all these sameAs etc.
relationships for incoming data to figure out that abc:title is really
the same as xyz:title because they are both sameAs dc:title.

 

I had the impression that in the meeting it was suggested that W3C
specifications may not want to refer to FOAF because it is outside of
W3C which feels like going for option (3) - not re-doing FOAF of course,
but in the sense of bringing existing FOAF under the W3C umbrella and
associated policies. I hope that is not the general answer.

 

Makx.

 

 


Makx Dekkers

makx@makxdekkers.com

+34 639 26 11 46