RE: Define/change the range of "supportedProperties" (ISSUE-37)

On Wednesday, March 05, 2014 8:17 PM, Thomas Hoppe wrote:
> On 03/03/2014 05:22 PM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> > On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 11:26 AM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
> >>> Actually, I like "attribute" a lot.
> >>> It's neutral. It conveys the intended meaning.
> >> attribute
> >> noun |ˈatrəˌbyo͞ot|
> >> 2 [Computing] a piece of information that determines the properties
> >> of a field or tag in a database or a string of characters in a
> display.
> >>
> >> Note how it explicitly says "determines the properties".
> >> That's exactly what we want to do.
> >
> > I read that slightly different. IMO an attribute defines whether a
> > specific field in a database is e.g. an autoincrement field. The read-
> > only flag in SupportedProperty is an attribute of the property that is
> > being described. It's a fuzzy matter, but I think I personally wouldn't
> > name a property supported by a class an attribute. In OOP programming,
> > a class attribute would be whether it is static, final, etc.
> >
> > Phil, why is naming always so damn difficult!? :-)
>
> I have to agree with your interpretation of the description from the
> oxford dictionary [1] and from wikipedia [2] which match.
> This brings us back to `property` but this collides with Ruben's
> objection regarding the fact that it is not really a property.

You mean, it brings us back to "supportedProperty", right?


> However, I just re-evauated this and meanwhile think that Ruben had a
> rather technical view on this which only SemWeb experts might have.
> Ruben points out that one might get the impression that a
> `hydra:supportedProperty` is an `rdf:Property`
> but in fact it is only a pointer to such a thing (if I understood
> correctly).

Yeah, exactly. It points to a SupportedProperty which is basically a description or wrapper of a "real property". 

So you have

  Some Class --- supportedProperty --> SupportedProperty
                                         |-- property --> Real property


>  From a vocabulary user's point of view on the other hand I think he
> would not think about this in the first place. Hydra is a vocab to
> describe APIs and a Class is one of the offered concepts. This
> concepts allows to describe properties supported by this class
> and thus corresponding resources. I think that's a comprehensible
> story.
> So from this point of view I think "supportedProperty" is the best name
> I can think of.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a better term either. But Ruben has a valid point. *S*upportedProperty (the class) could also be seen as a specialization of Property, i.e., a subclass thereof. So perhaps a middle ground would be to keep *s*upportedProperty but rename *S*upportedProperty to something like "PropertyDescription"!? That would perhaps make it clearer that it is kind of a wrapper around a real property.

What do you think? Ruben, would that work for you?

 
> [1]
> http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/es/definicion/ingles_americano/attrib
> ute
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_%28computing%29


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Wednesday, 5 March 2014 20:10:05 UTC