Re: Question about a link relationship attribute

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Eric Hellman <eric@hellman.net> wrote:
> Some lazy questions- I'm sure people have thought and discussed before.
> I was just acquainting myself with cito, and was wondering what people
> thought was the best link relationship  to use for the case of a web page
> which is a local representation of a book, as might be found on an OPAC item
> page, bookstore item page, or a discussion page on social network page. None
> of the cito attributes fit- same with bibo.
> Or is the web page just rdf:about the book? If I put an "like" button on the
> page, is the user liking the book or the discussion about the book?

That's a crafty (but good) question Eric, so I'll try a crafty
(perhaps heretical) answer.

My interpretation of REST [1] is that, as the minter of the URL, you
decide what the resource is that you are putting on the World Wide
Web. If you decide that the resource is a Web Document that is about
something else, and you want to say so, you can use something like
foaf:primaryTopic [2].

    <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008563135>
foaf:primaryTopic <http://openlibrary.org/works/OL1502053W/> .

You could probably also get away with using DublinCore:

   <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008563135>
dcterms:subject <http://openlibrary.org/works/OL1502053W/> .

Now for the heretical part. You could instead decide the resource you
are putting on the World Wide Web is the book itself, and your web
server delivers up representations of it:

    <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008563135> a bibo:Book .

Or if you want to get your like button working:

    <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008563135>
<http://ogp.me/ns#type> "book" .

I think the "bestness" of these different approaches depends on what
you are trying to do, and who you are trying to work with.

//Ed

[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2_1_1
[2] http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/topic-relation.html

Received on Tuesday, 15 February 2011 15:38:12 UTC