- From: Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:39:33 +0000
- To: Alexander Dutton <alexander.dutton@oucs.ox.ac.uk>
- Cc: Phil Archer <phil.archer@talis.com>, Linked Open Data <public-lod@w3.org>
On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 12:38 +0000, Alexander Dutton wrote: > On 04/01/11 11:49, Dave Reynolds wrote: > > The separation between the Site and the address isn't necessary in > > general, but it is necessary in order to reuse vcard. An org:Site isn't > > a vcard:Address [*] hence the need for the indirection. > > I think there's some confusion between the vCard and the address. You are right, my response wasn't clear - my head is not properly rebooted after the holidays :) At one point we had considered having org:siteAddress point directly to a vcard:Address, hence my confusing response. However, in the end we wanted to allow all the vcard properties (not just addresses) without conflating a site with its vcard. > I > would have said that: > > [] a org:Site, v:VCard ; > v:adr [ > ex:addressLine1 "Unit 5" ; > # or (if you prefer) > a v:Address ; > v:street-address "Unit 5" ; > … > ] > > I agree that addresses are not the same as sites, but I'm not sure that > there's any need to use the org:siteAddress property to distinguish a > site from its v:VCard. Using v:adr with an org:Site maintains that > separation without needing the intermediate resource. It's arguable either way. The semantics of what it means to be a vcard:VCard aren't that precise but I've tended to regard is as a representation of a glorified business card (i.e. a description of an information record, a "directory" entry to use the IETF terminology) rather than a representation of a physical or virtual location. I can't see a clear cut practical problem with the conflation but prefer the conservative approach of keeping them separate. That makes it easy to extend org:Site without worrying if that fits with the dual interpretation as a VCard. For example, an extension which talked about the physical size and population of an org:Site would be natural but I'm not sure they would make sense as attributes of a vcard. In principle, a Site could also have multiple vcards for different uses (e.g. a Goods-in back entrance with its own street address, map and phone number separate from the main reception but part of the same physical site). > The vCard ontology doesn't give a general property for linking a thing > to its v:VCard, which suggests to me that the only way to discover > addresses in the general case is when properties in the vCard namespace > are applied directly to people, places, etc. (In other words the v:VCard > class simply means "a thing to which addresses, phone numbers, etc are > attached".) I think it reflects more the nature of the vcard IETF spec (i.e. a specification of a content type for directory information) separate from the RDF usage of associating a directory entry with some entity. Cheers, Dave
Received on Tuesday, 4 January 2011 13:40:57 UTC