Records in (L)LD?

Hi Gordon,

Re. your questioning on the granularity of library metadata [1], and the notion of record, here's a link to one approach for data packaging in the LD realm: Concise Bounded Description (CBD, [2]).

The aim is to determine what data to send back for a given LD identifier, as "a general and broadly optimal unit of specific knowledge about that resource to be utilized by, and/or interchanged between, semantic web agents".
I trust this somehow matches the concerns that guide the creation of records in library. I'm thinking for example when you decide how much of one concept's description you should include in the description of the book that has this concept as subject. Very often you would have both identifier and label for that concept in the book record, I think. While only the identifier would be needed, in principle.

In theory, in the LD context, it would be sufficient to stop at the first de-referenceable identifier you bump into into when you navigate the graph of subject-predicate-object statements that "starts" at the resource of interest. Then, you can just fire a query for getting the description of this new identifier. This is the idea of CBD.

Yet CBD is only one of the algorithms that can be used to establish the limit of data to send for an LD identifier. It's mentioned as one solution for SPARQL DESCRIBE query results [3], but that spec is not trying to enforce any option, truly:
[
This data [...] is determined by the SPARQL query processor. The DESCRIBE form takes each of the resources identified in a solution, together with any resources directly named by IRI, and assembles a single RDF graph by taking a "description" which can come from any information available including the target RDF Dataset.
]

One explanation for this is leaving the door open to optimizing data communication. For example, when you know that an data consuming application interested in one resource (e.g., a book) will almost always be interested in details for its related resources (e.g., its subject). In such cases, it helps if the packages of data shipped by the LD service have a slightly wider scope.

In fact the SPARQL doc even continues with a library example :-)
[
It may include information about other resources: for example, the RDF data for a book may also include details about the author.
]

I wonder whether there could be something in the existing library data exchange practices, which could be adapted to the LD world. I'd be interested to hear opinions on this!

Best,

Antoine

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Granularity_of_library_metadata
[2] http://www.w3.org/Submission/CBD/
[3]http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/#describe

Received on Thursday, 20 January 2011 18:24:44 UTC