- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 15:26:50 +0100
- To: Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>
- Cc: Metadata Object Description Schema List <MODS@listserv.loc.gov>, public-lld <public-lld@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <AANLkTikF=y2mEUWMro=-qo2qkbqGVnj_t9xoRGk=C7PS@mail.gmail.com>
(sorry, resending from better address)
On 3 January 2011 15:26, Dan Brickley <danbri2011@danbri.org> wrote:
> On 3 January 2011 13:58, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:
>
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>> I'll be quick, as I've not so much though about it--probably the owners of
>> FOAF and VIAF have more insight...
>> I'd say that for (1) (2) and (3) there's nothing against creating 3
>> instances of foaf:Person, and connecting the mads:Authorities (or
>> skos:Concepts directly, in the VIAF approach) to them using foaf:focus.
>>
>
> Sounds plausible to me, though I'm missing a bit of context. I'm still
> tempted to throw a 'names as first class things' into the next FOAF revision
> btw; those use cases keep cropping up.
>
> Re fantasy/fictional organizations, I'd say that's fine FOAF-wise. We put
> the 'fictional is OK' note in the foaf:Person documentation but really
> that's a bit silly; it belongs more in the high level overview.
>
> Imagine if your natural language dictionary had a little footnote against
> every term ("you can use this term when saying things that aren't strictly,
> literally true"). Pretty redundant! Same goes for RDF perhaps. Certainly the
> fact that people write descriptions (a) that go out of date (b) that are
> true of the world at different times, ... that's very common. I wouldn't
> want to say that -say- an instance of foaf:Group representing [some part of]
> Enron is considered a poor use of RDF/FOAF simply because the thing is no
> longer existing. Temporal logic is a can of words, so best to leave some
> wiggle room and not be strict about "must exist!", since the natural
> response then is "when must they exist?". And RDF tries to pretend time and
> change don't need to be represented, so even answering is hard to do
> precisely.
>
> Now comes the issue of gluing the foaf:Persons together. We're still
>> missing a standard co-reference mapping link (softer than owl:sameAs) for
>> this; perhaps umbel:isLike [1] can be used.
>> I'd be much more confident about expressing the relation at the level of
>> mads:Authorities/skos:Concepts, using skos:exactMatch -- or skos:closeMatch,
>> depending on your feelings (or AACR2's) regarding ghosts :-)
>>
>
> Is there anything like a 'likelySameAs' property yet that can be truely
> asserted of some pair X, Y in the following cases:
>
> i) X and Y are the self-same, single thing
> ii) X and Y are different things, but close enough in the descriptions at
> hand that they could be mistaken for a single thing
> iii) nobody really knows, but (i) or (ii) seem very probably
>
> Many of the 'similar' or 'near' properties I've seen don't appear
> applicable to (i), ie. to assert X nearlyBla Y implies X is a different
> individual from Y. I'm interested more in the case where we might have 1
> entity, we might have 2, nobody is quite sure. I don't believe that
> situation has a property yet, but I could be wrong.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> Antoine
>>
>> [1] http://www.umbel.org/vocabulary#isLike%20Property
>>
>>
>> [Antoine - I'm adding public-lld to the cc list for this message, since
>>> there was some discussion dealing with linking VIAF records to
>>> real-world-objects].
>>>
>>> It's interesting to consider the relationship between:
>>>
>>> *(1) Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 *
>>> LCCN: n 79021164
>>> VIAF rdf: http://viaf.org/viaf/50566653/rdf.xml
>>>
>>> *(2) Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 1835-1910 *
>>> LCCN: n 93099439
>>> VIAF rdf: http://viaf.org/viaf/53367783/rdf.xml
>>>
>>> *(3) Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 (Spirit)*
>>> LCCN: n 82045653
>>> VIAF rdf: http://viaf.org/viaf/106965116/rdf.xml
>>>
>>> [Since VIAF make use of UMBEL, I will use UMBEL/Cyc as a reference]
>>>
>>> 1. All three of these Thing <
>>> http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvViA9JwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA> can be used to
>>> make assertions/claims about the Literary Identity of the creator of a
>>> ConceptualWork <http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rwClAZJwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA
>>> >.
>>>
>>> 2. Assertions of authorship made using the three different Things state
>>> different propositions.
>>> 3. (1) and (2) both correspond to names used by the same MaieHuman <
>>> http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvVjWoZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA>, they
>>> represent distinct Literary identities. Authorship attributions using (1)
>>> and (2) represent claims that the creation of the intellectual content of
>>> the work and the creation of the first tangible form of the work were both
>>> done by that MaleHuman <
>>> http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvVjWoZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA>.
>>> 4. Authorship attributions using (1) and (3) represent claims that that
>>> the intellectual content of the work was produced by the same MaleHuman <
>>> http://sw.opencyc.org/concept/Mx4rvVjWoZwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA> as in (1) and
>>> (2), but that the creation took place after his death, and that a different
>>> person created the first tangible form of the work. This person is given as
>>> an added entry.
>>>
>>> 5. Statements made using (3) are not believed to be true in consensual
>>> reality.
>>> 6. There is a specific rule for this is in the AACR 2. I am not making
>>> this up :-)
>>> 7. FOAF allows for non-existing Persons, so ghosts can be foaf:Person.
>>> This allows Fictional characters and non Christian deities to be represented
>>> as "Names" not "Subjects".
>>> 8. FOAF does not specifically allow for non-existent Corporate bodies
>>> or Groups. This requires fictional entities of this type to be handled
>>> separately (Ministry of Magic; Miskatonic University; etc.)
>>>
>>> Simon
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl <mailto:
>>> aisaac@few.vu.nl>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello Bruce,
>>>
>>> Would it alleviate your concern if you could use something like
>>> foaf:focus [1] to link instances of mads:Authority to instances of
>>> foaf:Person?
>>> This is what VIAF does (e.g., [2]), and there's nothing in the the
>>> current design of MADS/RDF that forbids it, since mads:Authority is a
>>> sub-class of skos:Concept.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Antoine
>>>
>>> [1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_focus
>>> [2] http://viaf.org/viaf/24604287/rdf.xml
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I've been away from this since my flaming away. Just wanted to
>>> chime
>>> in on Rob's points ...
>>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Rob Styles<rob.styles@talis.com<mailto:
>>> rob.styles@talis.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all, my 2 pence worth...
>>>
>>> Not a regular here, joining you specifically for the MADS/RDF
>>> discussion.
>>>
>>> ** Comments so far
>>> Some of the comments so far are a tad harsh. It's great to see
>>> LoC
>>> doing this stuff even if it's not exactly as one might have
>>> approached
>>> it. They know their data, maybe we should try to be a bit more
>>> supportive?
>>>
>>>
>>> Fair enough. But I do think we need to meet each other half way
>>> ("their data" is also "our data" in my view), and I think your
>>> comments are helpful (definitely more than mine) towards that end.
>>>
>>> ** Conceptual approach
>>> I've worked with library data for a long time and it's not
>>> simple
>>> stuff. A common first mistake is often to assume that
>>> something like
>>> the name authority talks about people and organisations when
>>> in fact
>>> it talks about "bibliographic entities" — the names printed in
>>> books,
>>> mostly.
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, I get this sort of indirection. But as an author of some of
>>> those
>>> bibliographic items, I'm still a person. And there needs to be a
>>> way
>>> to bring these two perspectives together. Concretely, if I have a
>>> description of Samuel Clemens in FOAF, I really want to know how
>>> to
>>> link that to some description of his pen persona/alter ego Mark
>>> Twain.
>>>
>>> These have been modelled and re-modelled over many years and
>>> authority
>>> data has evolved to meet specific needs. It is not an ideal
>>> starting
>>> point for publishing Linked Data.
>>>
>>> However, I think authority data could be approached
>>> differently to
>>> MADS/RDF. Where MADS/RDF uses bibliographic terms, many of
>>> which come
>>> from the record structures employed, I would prefer to see
>>> real-world
>>> terminology used. So, a class of "Name" would be a good thing
>>> to have,
>>> then we can talk about names. Where it is possible to identify
>>> a real
>>> person it would be good to use a class of Person (ideally the
>>> foaf
>>> one) and where we know the name is a pseudonym it would be
>>> great to
>>> have a Pseudonym class too. The current MADS/RDF approach
>>> remodels the
>>> authority /record/ where it may be preferable to model the
>>> authority
>>> /data/.
>>>
>>>
>>> To me, this (natural language terms, rather than jargon) would go
>>> a
>>> long way towards resolving some of my impulsive reaction against
>>> what
>>> I was seeing.
>>>
>>> The downside to that approach is that it can make
>>> round-tripping
>>> between the syntaxes harder. Consider round-tripping MARC and
>>> MARC/XML
>>> as compared with MARC and Dublin-Core XML?
>>>
>>>
>>> So this really comes down to what the priorities are for this
>>> effort?
>>> Is it absolutely clean round-tripping with legacy data, or is it
>>> to
>>> bring library data into the linked data world? Obviously one can
>>> try
>>> to do both, but there's some clear tension here.
>>>
>>> I would look again at anywhere you have a structure word such
>>> as
>>> /element/, /list/ or value as they are likely to be describing
>>> a
>>> record rather than describing things from the world.
>>>
>>>
>>> Right.
>>>
>>> I guess in the end, I'd really like the designers behind this
>>> effort
>>> to imagine that people other than library people might also want
>>> to
>>> use these data in the end, and to imagine how that might work.
>>>
>>> Imagine a case where some developer somewhere is writing some
>>> simple
>>> PHP application and wants to store some bibliographic data, but
>>> also
>>> wants to be able to link into some LoC SPARQL endpoint to enhance
>>> it.
>>> How would they do that? How would they know how to get what kinds
>>> of
>>> data, to present it how to their users?
>>>
>>> Right now, MADS RDF seems to me to be only intelligible to someone
>>> with a library degree, or with an awful lot of free time on their
>>> hands.
>>>
>>> And I agree, BTW, with Karen's suggestion that it makes sense to
>>> treat
>>> MADS (or insert other library representation) name representations
>>> (I
>>> don't, personas?) as distinct from foaf:Agent or foaf:Person, but
>>> to
>>> enable them to be linked.
>>>
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> Bruce
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
Received on Monday, 3 January 2011 14:27:25 UTC