RE: Southampton Pub data as linked open data

Thanks John for this resource - It inspires me to help my students to do
a similar data collection exercise in Bristol!

 

A few things puzzle me though, probably as a newcomer to this field. I'm
in the process of RDFing our faculty data so these issues are taxing me
too. 

 

 

1) The resource URI eg. http://www.johngoodwin.me.uk/pubs/id/pub1

 

is not humanly readable. Is this considered to be a problem?  For
example DBPedia would be I think be less valuable with system-generated
resource ids, even though natural resource ids require a mechanism for
disambiguation.  

 

2) The pub name has been re-formatting to catalogue order, but pub names
are proper nouns and I'd be laughed at if I asked the way to "Alexandra,
The".  Perhaps both forms could be included with a different tag for the
catalog format if it is not computable from the natural name.

 

3) Why have both rdfs:label and pub:name since they seem to have the
same content?

 

4) I feel uncomfortable with the non-uniform representation of the
address - partly with domain specific-tags pub:street and pub:postcode,
partly with a company-specific (and non-humanly decipherable) URI.  I
know that this is a can of worms e.g.
http://xml.coverpages.org/namesAndAddresses.html#eccma and I can't find
a suitable address vocabulary but this mixture doesn't look very
satisfactory.

 

5) pub:dateSurveyed:  isn't this  just the date at which the description
was authored (if not when it was entered into this format) i.e. dc:date 

 

6) Generally , these seem such general properties of any place that  I'm
surprised that any local vocabulary is needed at all, given that no data
is actually domain specific (like a list of beers served).  

 

This case study seems a great example of the issues in vocabulary and
resource reuse. It would be interesting to compare the different
solutions which different analysts would use to represent this data.
Perhaps something like it would be a good exercise for the Oxford
VoCamp?

 

Chris

 

 

Chris Wallace 

Senior Lecturer 

Department of Information Science and Digital Media

University of the West of England, Bristol

 

 



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Received on Monday, 28 July 2008 12:20:32 UTC