Re: Underline element.

On 1/14/08, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hmmm, I would want to argue against the inclusion
> of either "firstName" or "surname" on the grounds
> that their semantics are ill-defined (cultural
> differences ascribe different semantics); "familyname"
> and "givenname" I regard as unexceptionable.
>

...and that's what a vocabulary is about. E.g. FOAF defines what these
terms mean and how they relate to other terms. If you don't agree with
FOAF you are of course free to specify your own vocabulary. Cultural
differences often makes it difficult to specify meaningful terms whose
meaning is shared among many.

And, with subclassing you can start from e.g. foaf:firstName and
provide additional meaning in a vocabulary that is understood in your
culture.

Your question touches on an important issue. Defining vocabularies for
global use is difficult. Therefore it should be possible to do this in
a distributed fashion, locally. Anytime we discuss new elements that
belong to a specific domain we should be aware of this issue.

/Peter

Received on Monday, 14 January 2008 18:43:26 UTC