Re: Newbie LOD Questions :)

> and to ensure I've "got it"..
> essentially I could write the following sentence in a document 
> "'Kingsley Idehen' wrote a post entitled 'name of post'"; where the 
> 'name of post' is automatically injected at render time directly from 
> the rdf title of your post; so if you change the title, my sentence 
> remains accurate.
 
Yes, sounds like that ought to work.
 

>All that's left is:
>
> - my question regarding "combining data and resolving discrepancies" 
> (unless I find the answer upon closer analysis of the provided links);
 
I'm not aware of anything you'd call a convention for doing this.  In general, you need to make a choice about which sources of data you trust and your application has to be able to handle possible conflicts.  How you handle those will probably depend on the details of your purpose.  Of course for some subject-predicate combinations, it makes perfect sense to have multiple different values (like foaf:knows or rdf:type).
 
> - which are the preferred ontologies to use when trying to be very 
> specific about a subject (rather than dc.subject dc.creator etc which 
> are essentially free text based not URI identifier based)
 
For specifying an author, the Dublin Core Terms ontology lets you use a URI for the object, eg (using Turtle syntax) 
 
<my web page> dcterms:creator <http://faviki.com/person/example#me <http://faviki.com/person/example#me> > .
That would be my first choice in this case.
 
See http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ <http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/> 
 
If you want to say that your page is prinicipally about a specific thing and you have a URI for it (eg this page is about http://dbpedia.org/resource/London <http://dbpedia.org/resource/London> ) then you can use foaf:primaryTopic.  
 
<my web page> foaf:primaryTopic <http://dbpedia.org/resource/London <http://dbpedia.org/resource/London> > .
 
Note that you are only allowed one primary topic, because it is declared to be a 'functional property' in the FOAF ontology - if you have multiple topics, use foaf:topic instead.

Regards
 
Bill