Re: How to avoid that collections "break" relationships

Seems to me that the, um, mistake that is made here is to use the same property schema:knows for both the individual case and the list case. Why not invent a new property for the list case, say :knowsList, and add a relationship between them as an RDF triple:

:knowsList :listPropertyOf schema:knows .

where :listPropertyOf has the semantic condition 

aaa listPropertyOf bbb 
xxx aaa ddd
ddd schema:itemLIstElement yyy

imply

xxx bbb yyy 

Which can be published as a reference in the home document for the URL for :listPropertyOf , but implemented by whatever code anyone finds handy.

Pat Hayes

On Mar 24, 2014, at 10:24 AM, Markus Lanthaler <markus.lanthaler@gmx.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> We have an interesting discussion in the Hydra W3C Community Group [1]
> regarding collections and would like to hear more opinions and ideas. I'm
> sure this is an issue a lot of Linked Data applications face in practice.
> 
> Let's assume we want to build a Web API that exposes information about
> persons and their friends. Using schema.org, your data would look somewhat
> like this:
> 
>  </markus> a schema:Person ;
>            schema:knows </alice> ;
>            ...
>            schema:knows </zorro> .
> 
> All this information would be available in the document at /markus (please
> let's not talk about hash URLs etc. here, ok?). Depending on the number of
> friends, the document however may grow too large. Web APIs typically solve
> that by introducing an intermediary (paged) resource such as
> /markus/friends/. In Schema.org we have ItemList to do so:
> 
>  </markus> a schema:Person ;
>            schema:knows </markus/friends/> .
> 
>  </markus/friends/> a schema:ItemList ;
>            schema:itemListElement </alice> ;
>            ...
>            schema: itemListElement </zorro> .
> 
> This works, but has two problems:
>  1) it breaks the /markus --[knows]--> /alice relationship
>  2) it says that /markus --[knows]--> /markus/friends
> 
> While 1) can easily be fixed, 2) is much trickier--especially if we consider
> cases that don't use schema.org with its "weak semantics" but a vocabulary
> that uses rdfs:range, such as FOAF. In that case, the statement
> 
>  </markus> foaf:knows </markus/friends/> .
> 
> and the fact that
> 
>  foaf:knows rdfs:range foaf:Person .
> 
> would yield to the "wrong" inference that /markus/friends is a foaf:Person.
> 
> How do you deal with such cases?
> 
> How is schema.org intended to be used in cases like these? Is the above use
> of ItemList sensible or is this something that should better be avoided?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Markus
> 
> 
> P.S.: I'm aware of how LDP handles this issue, but, while I generally like
> the approach it takes, I don't like that fact that it imposes a specific
> interaction model.
> 
> 
> [1] http://bit.ly/HydraCG
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Markus Lanthaler
> @markuslanthaler
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2014 16:00:57 UTC