Re: How to model valid time of resource properties?

(Warning: I’m no expert in this.)

I think the sort of thing you are talking about has been a serious part of Museums and Archeology etc. for a long time.
They have quite a bit of experience of this.

The CIDOC-CRM, which can be represented in RDF (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/official_release_cidoc.html ) has a whole way of doing this, centred around E2 Temporal Entity.

I know ResearchSpace (http://www.researchspace.org ) uses this, and I’m sure Dominic, Barry and the team would be pleased to advise about doing all this in anger :-)


Of course, this may be overkill for you, and it would be simpler to use quads ;-)

Best
Hugh
> On 13 Oct 2014, at 12:54, Frans Knibbe | Geodan <frans.knibbe@geodan.nl> wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> I wonder if a way of recording changes in properties of resources can be recommended. Many resources in real life have properties that have a time range of being valid. In some datasets, only the current (or most recent) state of a resource is stored, but in many cases it is important to keep track of the history of development of a resource.
> An example:
> :john_smith
>     a foaf:person ;
>     foaf:name "John Smith" ;
> Let's say that on 2013-09-27 John Smith marries Betty Jones. John Smith is still the same person, so it makes sense to extend the same resource, not create a new version:
> :john_smith
>     a foaf:person ;
>     foaf:name “John Smith” ;
>     ex:marriedTo :betty_jones ;
> How could I efficiently express the fact that the statement :john_smith ex:marriedTo :betty_jones is valid from 2013-09-27? And if the couple divorces, that the property has expired after a certain date? It would be nice if the way of modelling makes it easy to request the most recent state of a resource, any historical state, or a list of changes during a time period.
> A quick web scan on the subject revealed some interesting research papers, but as far as I can tell all solutions need extensions of RDF and/or SPARQL to work.
> Perhaps this question is really about the ability to make statements about a triple? Which is a problem for which no satisfactory solution has been found yet?
> Regards,
> Frans 
> 
> Frans Knibbe
> Geodan
> President Kennedylaan 1
> 1079 MB Amsterdam (NL)
> 
> T +31 (0)20 - 5711 347
> E frans.knibbe@geodan.nl
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Received on Monday, 13 October 2014 12:24:53 UTC