Re: Triple(s) that describe the vocabulary

On Sun, 13 Nov 2011 14:18:21 +0100
Niklas Lindström <lindstream@gmail.com> wrote:

> > A good RDF predicate is one that fits naturally into the following
> > two phrases:
> >
> >        "has ..."
> >        "is ... of"
> 
> Actually there are a number of common predicates which don't follow
> this pattern (of a property noun) but rather a verb. For instance in
> Dublin Core there is 'replaces', 'requires', 'references' and
> 'conformsTo'; in FOAF there is 'knows', 'depicts' and 'based_near'.

FOAF has very badly named properties. It has no consistency. Witness
camelCase versus underscore_seperators. It is too ingrained to change
though. Most of the original Dublin Core properties were quite good;
some of the newer ones less so.

The role/noun pattern (or has/of antipattern) if you prefer is an
established meme - not just some idea I've dreamt up.

http://www.w3.org/wiki/HasPropertyOf
http://www.w3.org/wiki/RoleNoun

> Do you have an opinion regarding whether the object should be an IRI
> or a literal?

Purely from a semantic point of view, an xsd:anyURI typed literal
probably best reflects reality. But from a pragmatic point of view, an
IRI is probably most useful, as it allows "joins" between the document
being parsed and the vocab's graph in SPARQL. I'm not especially
bothered either way.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Sunday, 13 November 2011 21:25:05 UTC