Re: Planned changes to the VIAF RDF

On 12 April 2011 16:21, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
> Thom Hickey posted a blog entry about our plans to streamline the VIAF RDF.
>
>
>
> http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2011/04/changes-to-viafs-rdf.html
>
> I can elaborate on the listserv if anyone wants to discuss the changes.

Thanks, very interesting, and I'm happy to see foaf:focus finding a use :)

Regarding, "For example, would FOAF and RDA agree that Nicolas
Bourbaki is a “Person”?"

FOAF the spec just says something is of type foaf:Person is they are
... a person. In many ways FOAF functions much more like a dictionary
than like something with its own 'opinion' or strict rules. According
to FOAF it is usually not obviously screamingly mad to say that [...]
is a person. Just the further you go from canonically 'obvious'
people, the less useful it may be to stretch the foaf:Person class to
cover something. That's the thinking behind the apparent vagueness of
some definitions -- we're trying to allow for something of the
natural, organic characteristics of human concepts, even while
expressing them in a system based on a strict and tidy-minded logic.

All that said FOAF does say currently that foaf:Person and
foaf:Organization are disjoint, which means to avoid blatant
contradiction currently one would need to use different entities for
Bourbaki-as-(pseudo)Person and Bourbaki-as-(quirky)Organization (or
Group). My preference now would be to avoid having an explicit
disjointness statement between Person and Organization in the FOAF
schema, but I've not tried to persuade any wider community of that
yet.

How does RDA handle such entities?

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 12 April 2011 16:52:24 UTC