- From: Nathan <nathan@webr3.org>
- Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 15:13:36 +0000
- To: Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
- CC: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Vasiliy Faronov <vfaronov@gmail.com>, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>, Peter DeVries <pete.devries@gmail.com>, public-lod@w3.org
Hi Martin,
Martin Hepp wrote:
> For my taste, using rdfs:seeAlso is perfectly valid (yet suboptimal,
> because too unspecific), according to the RDFS spec:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_seealso
>
> Quote: "rdfs:seeAlso is an instance of rdf:Property that is used to
> indicate a resource that might provide additional information about
> the subject resource.
>
> A triple of the form:
>
> S rdfs:seeAlso O
>
> states that the resource O may provide additional information about S.
> It may be possible to retrieve representations of O from the Web, but
> this is not required. When such representations may be retrieved, ***no
> constraints are placed on the format of those representations***."
There are other ways of looking at this, remembering we're in the realm
of machine readable information and the context of RDF. rdfs:seeAlso is
used to indicate a resource O which may provide additional information
about the resource S - information in this context being rdf,
information for the machine - so we can say that if O points to a
resource that doesn't contain any information at all (no rdf, or isn't
the subject of any statements) then we've created a meaningless
statement, it may as well be { S rdfs:seeAlso [] }
One could easily suggest that it's good for RDF Schema properties to
have some use in RDF, and thus that if rdfs:seeAlso is used in a
statement, that it should point to some "information", some rdf for the
machine, otherwise it's a bit of a pointless property.
Given the above, we could take the meaning of the sentence "no
constraints are placed on the format of those representations" and
assert that this simply means that RDF/XML is not required, and that any
RDF format can be used.
Generally it appears to me that rdfs:seeAlso is a property for a machine
to follow in order to get more information, and that much of the usage
mentioned in this thread requires a property which informs a human that
they may want to check resource O for more information - essentially
something similar to a hyperlink in a html document with no @rel value.
Best,
Nathan
Received on Wednesday, 12 January 2011 15:14:43 UTC