Re: Datatypes with no (cool) URI

Thanks Ivan and thank you, Leigh.

What I like about Leigh's suggestion is that it gives a way to associate 
a string like "ISO/IEC 5218:2004" with a URI and I can show that as a 
generalised guidance note without necessarily saying "use one of these 
controlled vocabularies that we don't control and that you may not 
like". So I think the way is fairly clear:

If there is a suitable controlled vocabulary (and in the particular use 
case I'm referring to there is - SDMX) - then use it;

If you can construct a suitable datatype URI then use that (The HL7 
terms have OIDs which can be given as a stable URI from a look up service)

If you can't do these things - and you really can't sensibly with PDFs 
on a portal, perhaps behind a paywall, then Leigh's method is the way to 
go. However... as always, we should look for other instances where this 
has been done so we don't invent lots of URIs for the same datatype and 
then have to fall back on loads of owl:sameAs assertions.

OWL data ranges look nice but it's not the kind of thing most public 
administrations will want to get into.

Incidentally, I did contact Norman Paskin at DOI who sent me a positive 
reply. DOIs for ISO standards are not ruled out and it has been 
discussed, especially in the context of CrossRef, but, as ever, it's 
complicated.

Phil.

On 04/04/2012 13:13, Ivan Herman wrote:
> Phil,
>
> Reading Leigh's mail and his reference to the XML Schema datatypes and RDF document: I wonder whether a possible way forward would not be to define your own datatypes as derived datatypes from good-old xsd datatypes, but using the OWL 2 facilities:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Data_Ranges
>
> My understanding is that you would need datatypes with a very restricted set of possible values; these can be described using these OWL 2 features. The advantage is that you can then mint the URI-s you want for those and, with a bit of luck, some OWL environment can handle them (which is probably not the case if you use those ISO datatypes in RDF, for example). Of course, as Leigh said, you can also define those datatypes in XML Schema, but I would not expect OWL reasoners to handle those.
>
> B.t.w., by OWL reasoner I do not necessarily mean something very complex. My overly simple (and inefficient:-) OWL RL environment:
>
> http://www.ivan-herman.net/Misc/2008/owlrl/
>
> also handle some of the simpler cases...
>
> Just an idea
>
> Ivan
>
> On Apr 4, 2012, at 10:30 , Leigh Dodds wrote:
>
>> (apologies if this is a re-post, I don't think it made it through y'day)
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:29 PM, Dave Reynolds<dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> On 03/04/12 16:38, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 12-04-03 02:33 PM, Phil Archer wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 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.
>> ...
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps I'm looking at your problem the wrong way, but have you looked
>>>> at the SDMX Concepts:
>>>>
>>>> http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/code#sex
>>>>
>>>> -Sarven
>>>>
>>>
>>> I was going to suggest that :)
>>
>> +1. A custom datatype doesn't seem correct in this case. Treating
>> gender as a category/classification captures both the essence that
>> there's more than one category&  that people may differ in how they
>> would assign classifications.
>>
>> I wrote a bit about Custom Datatypes here:
>>
>> http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/custom-datatype.html
>>
>> This use case aside, there ought to be more information to guide
>> people towards how to do this correctly.
>>
>> See also:
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-xsch-datatypes/
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> L.
>>
>
>
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
> mobile: +31-641044153
> FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf
>
>
>
>
>

-- 


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2012 12:24:12 UTC