Re: INSEE releases OWL ontology and RDF data for geographical entities

Hi,

Le jeudi 03 août 2006 à 23:26 +0200, Bernard Vatant a écrit :
> 
> Dan
> > did you consider using # rather than /? i.e.
> >   http://rdf.insee.fr/geo#code_commune
> > rather than
> >   http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/code_commune
> > especially for ontologies, it's a lot easier to manage.
> >   
> We did consider. Actually my first version of the ontology used a #
> namespace. Eric (in cc)  was the one who suggested a / namespace,
> especially for the data and somehow convinced the rest of us. That was
> six months ago, but if I remember correctly, the idea was that at some
> point, each instance URI would  be (should be, hopefully will be)
> associated  with, and access to, a  separate resource, which is not
> the case now. 

Yes, that was the first comment I did on your first proposal end of
January.

The idea was that to identify a city, http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/COM_80078
is better than http://rdf.insee.fr/geo#COM_80078. Of course, these URIs
are only identifiers but who konws, we might want some day to publish
some kind of documentation (like we do in RDDL to document namespaces)
at these URIs. 

If we do so, the first URI makes each city a standalone entity while the
second one means that they need to be fragments in a huge document which
can cause a lot of issues (we don't know which media types we might want
to publish and the definition of fragments is inconsistent between media
types (some of them don't even support fragments), the document might
grow very large, ...). 

Now, the thing that we've not considered is to have a namespace URI
different from the RDF base.

> Agreed, we could have kept the # namespace for the ontology at least.

Dan, can you elaborate why that makes ontologies a lot easier to manage?

Thanks;

Eric

> 
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