Resource identity again (was: Re: MARC Codes for Forms of Musical Composition)

Hi Jeff,  others,


> One reason umbel:isLike isn’t broadly used might be because people
> assume owl:sameAs is named intuitively.


Yes, quite probably.
In fact isLike's name makes me think of a derivation link, or even just a general similarity between object. And even if their documentation (which is quite well done for that property) says it's not a general similarity property, there's still instruction that seems to limit the use of it [1]:
[It is appropriate to use this property when there is strong belief the two resources refer to the same individual with the same identity, but that association can not be asserted at the present time with certitude.]


The traditional issue with owl:sameAs comes from the situations where we know that the resources denote the same thing "in real world", but we don't want to bluntly merge the statements about them. Would umbel:isLike solve the issue? Reading the documentation, it seems to me that it can only do it partially--which does not render it useless in absolute, of course.

In fact isLike's name now seems to me really appropriate to its semantics :-) Comparing with the SKOS situation, umbel:isLike would be analogous to skos:closeMatch without the skos:exactMatch cases (exactMatch is a sub-property of closeMatch, which amounts to closeMatch capturing both exact concept similarity and approximate one).

I'm ccing Frédérick Giasson, so that he gets the opportunity to clarify the point, or to orient us to the suitable umbel doc with the answer!

A final word: there was some discussion about this at the RDF Next Step workshop [2], maybe some light will come from the outcome of its efforts...

Cheers,

Antoine

[1] http://www.umbel.org/technical_documentation.html#vocabulary
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/index.php?title=RDF_Core_Work_Items&oldid=1990#Co-reference_vocabulary_as_alternative_to_owl:sameAs

PS: Ross I understand your reluctance to use SKOS mapping properties, btw.



> *From:* rxs@talisplatform.com [mailto:rxs@talisplatform.com] *On Behalf
> Of *Ross Singer
> *Sent:* Thursday, July 08, 2010 1:25 PM
> *To:* Karen Coyle
> *Cc:* William Waites; Houghton,Andrew; public-lld; Young,Jeff (OR)
> *Subject:* Re: [open-bibliography] MARC Codes for Forms of Musical
> Composition
>
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net
> <mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net>> wrote:
>
>     rdfs:seeAlso seems to be similar to the http "link" -- there's some
>     relationship, but you don't know what it is. Wouldn't some of this
>     be solved by having richer relationships?
>
> Definitely. The issue more lies in finding a relationship that not only
> says what you want, but is also common enough that other people (or,
> really, agents, but there's still a person there somewhere) recognize
> it. For example, umbel:isLike (like Jeff mentioned, like
> http://purl.org/NET/marccodes/muscomp/dv#genre uses) hits a fairly sweet
> spot, I think, as far as saying you think you're talking about the same
> thing, but nobody really uses umbel, really.
>
> And therein lies the rub. If skos:exactMatch/closeMatch didn't infer
> skos:Concepts on either end or foaf had some equivalency property, no
> problem. But some relatively obscure vocabulary (with a very difficult
> to grok general purpose) is going to be a much tougher sell.
>
> -Ross.
>

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 08:33:38 UTC