Action Item from WCAG 2.0 meeting 5-18-2006: Definition of 'Relationship'

David,

We had an action Item to come up with a Definition of 'Relationship' from last week. I chased down the RDF Primer stuff I was looking for and found other interesting information as well. Basically what I have pulled together are just thoughts, that will require discussion, real definitions of 'Relationship' and collaborative writing. I did not find a definition for "Relationship" in any W3C Glossary.


Relationship relative to today's web architecture:

* My words, start *

TBL talks about the importance of relationships of Web Resources (URIs) when he discusses XML, the Semantic Web and machine-understandable (as well as human-understandable - in my head anyway) information to enable interoperability, reliability and flexibility in enhancing the infrastructure of the Web as well as increasing its automation abilities.

Relationships can express some information about (Web) resources and how they relate (or do not relate) to each other. This is useful particularly in search functions.

How a relationship is defined can be information that enables it's use (and rendering) by user agents. * Maybe * (in a variety of ways).

RDF talks about those relationships and allows one to be relate broader as well as more specific resources.

* My words, end *



DID not find a definition for "Relationship" in any W3C Glossary. Most stuff is in RDF and RDF Schema discussions.


RDF Primer
W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/

Like HTML, this RDF/XML is machine processable and, using URIs, can link pieces of information across the Web. However, unlike conventional hypertext, RDF URIs can refer to any identifiable thing, including things that may not be directly retrievable on the Web (such as the person Eric Miller). The result is that in addition to describing such things as Web pages, RDF can also describe cars, businesses, people, news events, etc. In addition, RDF properties themselves have URIs, to precisely identify the relationships that exist between the linked items.





Resource Description Framework
(RDF) Schema Specification 1.0
W3C Candidate Recommendation 27 March 2000
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-rdf-schema-20000327/

say in it's Introduction.............

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for processing metadata; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web. RDF uses XML to exchange descriptions of Web resources but the resources being described can be of any type, including XML and non-XML resources. RDF emphasizes facilities to enable automated processing of Web resources. RDF can be used in a variety of application areas, for example: in resource discovery to provide better search engine capabilities, in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships available at a particular Web site, page, or digital library, by intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange, in content rating, in describing collections of pages that represent a single logical "document", for describing intellectual property rights of Web pages, and for expressing the privacy preferences of a user as well as the privacy policies of a Web site. RDF with digital signatures will be key to building the "Web of Trust" for electronic commerce, collaboration, and other applications. 

Descriptions used by these applications can be modeled as relationships among Web resources. The RDF data model, as specified in [RDFMS], defines a simple model for describing interrelationships among resources in terms of named properties and values. RDF properties may be thought of as attributes of resources and in this sense 
correspond to traditional attribute-value pairs. RDF properties also represent relationships between resources. As such, the RDF data model can therefore resemble an entity-relationship diagram. The RDF data model, however, provides no mechanisms for declaring these properties, nor does it provide any mechanisms for defining the 
relationships between these properties and other resources. That is the role of RDF Schema.

Received on Thursday, 25 May 2006 16:26:03 UTC