Re: URIs as value

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:12 AM, Pierre-Antoine Champin
<swlists-040405@champin.net> wrote:
>
> 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?

I actually really like this idea - and the RDF focus. Many people will
be moving towards describing meta information in RDF/foaf elements, so
describing a way to integrate media annotations with this new
knowledge base is really important.

And I also like the idea of thinking about the API wrt how to retrieve
values from RDF URI. How would you propose to go about it in your
given example?

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 22:39:25 UTC