RE: Event significance

Hi Misha,

In ISO 15926 we use 'templates' that are in fact n-ary relations [1]. I
think that is what you might consider. You then build a vocabulary of such
templates. 

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/

Regards,
Hans



-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Misha Wolf
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 21:34
To: newsml-2@yahoogroups.com; semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Event significance


Our journalists want to be able to indicate the significance of an event to
one or more entities.  Consider hurricane Katrina.  It had a high
significance to (among others) New Orleans, Louisiana, the oil industry.  So
how could we indicate this in NewsML 2?  It is rather challenging, as we're
talking about the interaction between a number of subjects:
-  the event itself (a hurricane)
-  the city of New Orleans
-  the state of Louisiana
-  the oil sector

As has been mentioned today in another thread, the NewsML 2 approach is to
design and use our own metadata structures and to write transforms which can
convert these metadata structures to RDF.
That way we can write XML which is very compact, easy to understand,
expressive, and easy to convert to RDF, eg:

  <subject code="iso3166-2:US-LA" relevance="80" confidence="80" 
      created="2005-08-29">
    <sameAs code="usps:LA"/>
    <childOf code="iso3166-1:US"/>
    <title xml:lang="en">Louisiana</title>
    <title xml:lang="fr">Louisiane</title>
  </subject>

For more details, see the NewsML 2 draft Technical Specification [1].

So how can we design in significance?  My current thinking is that
we:

-  Add a significance attribute to the subject element.

-  State that when this attribute is applied to a subject which 
   represents an entity, then the value of the attribute represents 
   the significance to that entity of any nearby subject which 
   represents an event.
   
What do I mean by "nearby"?  If a <bag/> has been used to group the
subjects, then nearby means within the bag.

If a <bag/> has not been used to group the subjects, then nearby means
within the item metadata.

BTW, I imagine that an event could have a type of "event", eg:

  <subject code="nc:03007000" type="typ:event">
    <childOf code="nc:03000000"/>
    <title xml:lang="en">Meteorological disaster</title>
    <title xml:lang="fr">Désastre météorologique</title>
  </subject>
 
which would make it easier to figure out which of the subjects is the event.

If other events were present, eg:

  <subject code="nc:03005000" type="typ:event">
    <childOf code="nc:03000000"/>
    <title xml:lang="en">Flood</title>
    <title xml:lang="fr">Inondation</title>
  </subject>

then the significance relationship would encompass all of them.

Note that an event or set of events often has a different significance for
different entities.  For example, Katrina had some impact on the US Space
Shuttle program, but this effect was minor compared to the effect on New
Orleans.

Similarly, consider a large company buying, or investing in, a small
company.  The effect of the transaction on the large company may be small,
but the effect on the small company may be large.

This is why the significance has to be directly associated with the subject
representing the entity, not with the subject representing the event.

Please let me have your comments.

[1] http://www.iptc.org/NAR/1.0/specification/

Misha
------------------- NewsML 2 resources ------------------------------
http://www.iptc.org/        | http://www.iptc.org/NAR/
http://www.iptc.org/NAR/1.0 | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newsml-2/


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Received on Saturday, 11 March 2006 10:19:19 UTC