- From: Phil Archer <phila@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:33:11 +0100
- To: "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>
I'm hoping for a bit of advice and rather than talk in the usual generic terms I'll use the actual example I'm working on. I want to define the best way to record a person's sex (this is related to the W3C GLD WG's forthcoming spec on describing a Person [1]). To encourage interoperability, we want people to use a controlled vocabulary and there are several that cover this topic. ISO 5218 has: 0 = not known; 1 = male; 2 = female; 9 = not applicable. and Eurostat offers F = female M = male OTH = other UNK = unknown NAP = not applicable IMO, the spec should not dictate which one to use (there are others too of course). What I *do* want to do though is to encourage publishers to state which vocabulary they're using. Sounds like a job for a datatype - and for that you need a URI for the vocabulary. Something like: schema:gender "1"^^<http://iso.org/5218/> . Except I made that iso.org URI up. The actual URI for it is http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36266 (or rather, that's the page about the spec but that's a side issue for now). That URI is just horrible and certainly not a 'cool URI'. The Eurostat one is no better. Does the datatype URI have to resolve to anything (in theory no, but in practice? Would a URN be appropriate? Given that the identifier for the ISO standard is "ISO/IEC 5218:2004" how about urn:iso/iec:5218:2005? For Eurostat, the internal identifier for the vocabulary is "SCL - Sex" (standard code list) so would urn:eurostat:scl:sex be appropriate? Anyone done anything like this in the real world? All advice gratefully received. Thank you Phil. [1] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/gld/raw-file/default/people/index.html -- Phil Archer W3C eGovernment http://www.w3.org/egov/ http://philarcher.org @philarcher1
Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 13:33:40 UTC