Re: frad:Person and foaf:Person

Skosxl:Label treates "names" as first class objects. There is a solution here somewhere, but we need to separate the identity of "the name" from "the thing". Skosxl:prefLabel/altLabel do that. Authority is also important when naming and skos:inScheme helps there.

Jeff

Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

Quoting Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>:


>
> Is the distinction one concerning the 'things in the world', or more
> about their actual descriptions in some particular record?


Dan, this is one of those areas where the library cataloging view is  
very particular but also very different from the SemWeb view. First, I  
suggest taking a look at the diagrams that Gordon pointed us to:

http://www.gordondunsire.com/pubs/docs/frdiagrams.pdf

You will see there that names of things are first class objects in the  
library world. The reasons for this are historical (not hysterical):  
In past technologies, what libraries mainly aimed to do with names was  
to create an identity; and an identity for the bibliographic entity is  
the name. (The name of a Person, a Corporate body, but also of a Work  
or a Manifestation -- the latter called 'titles' but still with the  
role of identification.)

There is no 'things in the world' concept in library cataloging in the  
sense that there is in SemWeb. This is in part because the library  
catalog is a closed environment where all references are to other  
things in the library catalog (or potentially in the library catalog).  
Creating a mind meld between this model and the SemWeb model is going  
to take some fancy footwork.

It is this aspect of 'identification' as a primary purpose of the  
library person entity that makes the linking of frad:Person and  
foaf:Person so ... interesting.

kc


>
> The 'identified by a particular name' bit sounds like a constraint on
> a description. Although you might imagine some peculiar group who
> managed to act as a unit without having any consistent collective name
> (and therefore no name that could be used in a record), that's perhaps
> an unintended corner case. The emphasis here seems not to be in that
> direction - but rather on names that exist but are not mentioned in
> the right description. Is that a fair reading?
>
> If so I'd call this a single class, and express the rule about names
> as [something like] an application profile.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 00:30:37 UTC