Re: VIAF contributor model

> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Ross Singer<ross.singer@talis.com>  wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 6:31 AM, Haffner, Alexander<A.Haffner@d-nb.de>  wrote:
>>
>>> However, back to the formats I don’t want to discuss J foaf doesn’t have the
>>> power to reflect our comprehensive data – I thought we want to make this
>>> high quality data available for the public –if so we should have a closer
>>> look modeling the data in FRBRer, FRAD and/or RDA in parallel to the SKOS
>>> representation.
>>>
>> I keep seeing this statement getting made: "FOAF/SKOS are not
>> expressive enough for our data" and I'm simply not buying it.
>>
>> Can somebody please back up this claim?  FOAF defines personal and
>> organizational entities.  SKOS defines concepts.
>>
>> Those are exactly the things we're describing.
>
> The design of RDF reflects this situation - typically no single RDF
> vocabulary captures all use cases and needs. If we can agree on the
> basic layout in terms of common classes, that gives a skeleton for
> interoperability, fleshed out (oh dear, excuse the metaphor) with more
> detailed precise properties from different application domains. So RDF
> is a design for sharing out the descriptive work...
>
> I'll repeat the earlier offer - if there are people/org/agent
> properties that are generally useful, and needed by several properties
> here, I'm happy getting them added to FOAF (if that's not treading on
> any FR** toes, of course).
>


+1 re. the design of RDF and complementary vocabularies. It is true that FOAF and SKOS are not expressive enough to capture all data in authority files. And this is good. I cannot speak for FOAF perhaps, but I feel having simple vocabularies on the table that do not undertake the task of modeling everything is an asset. Stuff like VIAF's aggregation [1] are indeed quite complex and would indeed require specific machinery to be used as complement.
Further, even if simple SKOS and SKOS do capture quite a lot of the really interesting stuff in the data. So they can be used, the question is then how to articulate them with other models which are richer (or just focused on different aspects of data). To be fair to Alexander, he spoke of using other vocabularies "in addition [to FOAF/SKOS" or "in parallel", not "instead of". And I strongly believe it is the right way to consider things.

Cheers,

Antoine

[1] btw I believe VIAF should indeed represent that aggregation stuff next to the simpler data, as we'll try to do in Europeana.

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 14:27:50 UTC