Re: Planned changes to the VIAF RDF

Ed Summers wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 9:18 AM, Dan Brickley<danbri@danbri.org>  wrote:
>> I tend to see your question as a variant on "why both using SKOS RDF
>> to describe concepts of thing, when I could just describe the world
>> directly in RDF?".
>
> Not really. My question is actually why bother describing the same
> thing (in this case a Person) twice. What actual use cases does it
> serve?

I think the issue is similar to non-information- vs. 
information-resource. Some want to distinguish the homepage of a person 
and some don't bother.

I the context of linked library data I prefer having one URI for one 
person, and it can be all of foaf:Person, rdaEnt:Person, skos:Concept 
(plus any yourPersonalOntology:Stuff). We can still distinguish 
person_as_x and person_as_y:

<person_123> a skos:Concept, foaf:Person, rdaEnt:Person ;
   skos:narrower
     <person_123_as_politician>,
     <person_123_as_parent>
     <person_123_as_author> .

It's difficult enough to tell people to always use one unique identifier 
for one person, and to use an URI instead of some local, ad-hoc 
character sequence.

Jakob

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss@gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de

Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 17:33:04 UTC