Re: [open-bibliography] MARC Codes for Forms of Musical Composition

At Wed, 7 Jul 2010 16:31:07 -0400,
Young,Jeff (OR) wrote:
> 
> Erik,
> 
> What Andy and I are suggesting are not "arbitrarily different URIs".
> These are different URIs that preserve (rather than conflate) the
> identity of things with different types (especially across different
> ontologies). Ross said it as well as anyone possibly could: "Other
> people think differently". Our suggestion is to accept and respect these
> differences.

Hi Jeff,

I find myself agreeing with your arguments, but not with the
conclusion. The arguments that I have heard do not justify defining a
rule or even best practice that multiple rdf:types should not be
assigned to a single resource.

I have not heard an answer to Ross’ question to what is wrong with:

  <http://purl.org/NET/book/isbn/0192838024#book> a 
    <http://purl.org/NET/book/vocab#Book>,
    <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/Book>,
    <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#Manifestation> .

If I imagine the alternative:

  <http://purl.org/NET/book/isbn/0192838024#book> a 
    <http://purl.org/NET/book/vocab#Book> .
  <http://purl.org/NET/book/isbn/0192838024#bibo> a 
    <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/Book> .
  <http://purl.org/NET/book/isbn/0192838024#frbr> a 
    <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#Manifestation> .

I an think of at least the following difficulties, off the top of my
head:

a) Using rdf:seeAlso between these URIs does not adequately describe
   their relationship. This could obviously be addressed.
b) If one person links to #bibo and one to #frbr, they need more
   information to know that they are talking about the same thing.
c) Even having this information, any queries, etc. against the
   data will involve two steps, e.g.:

  SELECT * WHERE {
    ?b1 ex:hasVariant ?b2 .
    ?b1 rdf:type vocab:Book .
    ?b2 rdf:type frbr:Manifestation .
    ?p1 ex:likes ?b1 .
    ?p2 ex:likes ?b2 . }

> Splitting hairs on "person" misses the point that the interpretation of
> similarities and differences different ontologies is highly subjective.
> Freely conflating types on a subjective basis undermines unexpected
> reuse where the distinctions are important.

Likewise, requiring every resource to have a single rdf:type hierarchy
undermines expected reuse when the distinctions are unimportant.

best, Erik

Received on Thursday, 8 July 2010 05:04:40 UTC