Re: [ALL] agenda telecon 24 Jun - 1500 UTC

Sean,

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 10:22:13AM +0100, Sean Bechhofer wrote:
>                                                    In some
> circumstances, the expected value of a documentation property is a
> literal value (e.g. a simple textual note). In other circumstances,
> the value may be an object, for example the value of skos:changeNote
> may be a structured object containing information about a change along
> with provenance or date information. Documentation properties are
> defined as subproperties of skos:note.

In my experience, the difference between a literal value
and an object value is one of the hardest things about RDF
and OWL to explain or teach (not to mention the notion of an
"expected" value).  

I am therefore interested to see your choice of words here
-- "object" and particularly "structured object containing
information".  (Early RDF specs referred to "structured values"
[1,2], perhaps in an attempt to make the notion easier
to explain to people accustomed to nested XML.)  In this WG
we have spoken about values as "resources" as opposed to
"objects" (or anything "structured").

What you mean to say is clear, so my point is tangential
to this text.  But I expect the question of how to explain
this will come up in the context of finishing "4.3. Advanced
Documentation Features" in the Primer [3], so I would be
interested to know which choice of words is most consistent
with current specs and primers in this area.

Tom

[1] http://www.w3.org/Talks/1999/0512-RDF-rrs/slide4-0.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/SKOS/DraftPrimer?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=SKOSPrimer-080527.html


-- 
Tom Baker - tbaker@tbaker.de - baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 10:46:21 UTC