Re: [OEP] New draft of the note on n-ary relations

Good to see this progressing (unlike my various TODOs, embarrasingly).

I think I have an interesting use-case for you.

The MusicBrainz project has a lot of metadata about... music.

Artists, Tracks/CDs, Albums etc. Leigh Dodds has been working on 
a schema to go on the MB site; currently it serves RDF descriptions 
of albums etc but there's nothing at the namespace. Recently the MB
team have come up with something that builds nicely on their core
dataset, an "Advanced Relationships" system that allows MB contributors
to catalogue a broader range of relationships amongst the entities
MB knows about. 
http://blog.musicbrainz.org/archives/2004/12/advanced_relati.html

example:
http://test.musicbrainz.org/mm-2.1/artistrel/4d5447d7-c61c-4120-ba1b-d7f471d385b9

This is imho interesting for n-ary, because the system internally 
keeps track of more than simple binary relationships. Some relationships 
are qualified with date ranges. For example, two artists were married 
between certain dates, or one artists played in another group between 
certain dates. 

I've not studied the WD and editors WD as carefully as I should, but 
from my experience this scenario (wanting to have an idiom for recording
'"x some-rel y" held between some-dates') is quite a common one. People 
ask me for similar on the FOAF list periodically, for example.

Do you have any advice for how MusicBrainz might proceed?

This btw is likely to be a dynamically growing namespace/dataset, 
as new relationships are added to the MusicBrainz database. I don't 
think we need to worry overly about formally capturing the intent 
w.r.t. temporal qualifications; rather, we just want a nice way 
of writing that info down, so that applications can get to it 
again.

Thanks for any thoughts,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 26 January 2005 21:53:24 UTC