URIs as value

Hi all,

since I was only on IRC for the last telecon, I may have miss some part
of the debate. However, I would like to develop on my suggestion to
allow URIs or strings in properties such as dc:creator.

Imposing a particular structure to a property may raise some issues,
related for example to internationalization. So simple strings seem to
be a nice fallback option.
However, it would be a shame to ignore more precise information when it
is available (for a string may be quite ambiguous, e.g. "Pierre-Antoine
Champin", "P-A. Champin", "Pierre-A Champin"...). It is out of scope to
provide an ontology for describing persons, but if such an ontology
exists out there, why not allow to use it when it is available (e.g.
http://champin.net/foaf.rdf#me).

So I think both should be possible: string for simplicity, URI for
expressivity. May be both could be mixed, e.g. like in mail addresses:

  dc:creator "P-A. Champin <http://champin.net/foaf.rdf#me>" .


Now, that raises the question of the kind of URI we require. I have an
RDF background, I would tend to say: any URI, it is up to the
application to retrieve the description of that URI. If it follows good
practices, it should be possible to retrieve the description by GETting
it (requesting application/rdf+xml) but that may not be the only way to
obtain a description... and prescribing one is out of scope of the WG, I
think.

That also raises the question of the API: should it be able to retrieve
and access the RDF triples associated to the URI value of a property
from the ontology?

  pa

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 22:13:12 UTC