Re: metadata about relationships

Hi Will,

what you are describing is indeed an knowledge representation structure 
problem of RDF (or subject-predicate-object in general), since it is 
based on binary relations. However, you would like to describe n-ary 
relations. Therefore, you'll need a kind of reification mechanism to be 
able to describe such a binary relation more in detail.
On solution is to make use of the Property Reification Vocabulary (PRV) 
[1] that deals with this issue on the vocabulary level, i.e., it enables 
a inference engine to automatically related binary relations with n-ary 
relations that belongs semantically together. The example at the 
documentation site of PRV makes use of the Cognitive Characteristics 
Ontology (CCO) [2], which could be viewed as an extension of FOAF to 
describe cognitive characteristics (not only interests) more in detail.
Generally, you could apply PRV to every ontology terms out there.

Cheers,


Bo


PS: Don't hesitate to ask further questions, I'm a co-developer of PRV 
and CCO ;)


[1] http://purl.org/ontology/prv/core#
[2] http://purl.org/ontology/cco/core#

On 2/21/2012 12:12 PM, Will Norris wrote:
> In general, schema.org <http://schema.org> (or microdata in general?)
> seems to lack the ability to specify metadata for the relationship
> between items.  I'm curious if there is a general pattern for how this
> data should be modeled.
>
> First a concrete example.  The Person type describes an individual
> person, and the EducationalOrganization type describes an actual
> education institution.  The 'alumniOf' property defines the existence of
> a relationship between a Person and an EducationalOrganization, but
> there is nowhere to provide additional metadata about that relationship.
>   Things like graduation year, field of study, etc.  Similarly for work
> information defined by either 'worksFor' or the more general
> 'affiliation'.  I know there has been discussion of including a CV
> schema which would likely address these specific examples, but this
> seems to be a more general problem with RDF style triples.  There's
> plenty of space to exhaustively define the subject and object, but no
> room to provide metadata around the predicate.  How is this type of
> thing handled in general?
>
> And more specifically, how should it be handled in the above examples?
>   We include this metadata in Google+ profiles, and are able to include
> it cleanly in Portable Contacts, but I don't see how to represent it in
> schema.org <http://schema.org>.
>
> -will

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 09:30:34 UTC