How to describe composite products..?

I've recently been doing a little electric guitar modding, and I'm
wondering how best to describe the (material) results in RDF. It's
quite rich information conceptually, you need to talk about
relationships involving instruments and their parts in general as well
as individual instruments and their individual parts. Because of these
different facets, I believe rather more than direct use of RDFS's
class hierarchies is needed, SKOS maybe augmented with a bit of OWL
seems a likely candidate.

A fairly generic application of what I'm after would be to describe a
(composite) product in a company catalogue, while also allowing their
repair department to talk about a particular customer's broken product
and its parts.

Does anyone know of any work in this area?

The only vocabulary shaped like this of which I'm aware is that of
FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) [1], which
makes distinctions between Works, Manifestations, Items and
Expressions. But I'm really not sure how reusable this is in the
domain I have in mind as the target objects in FRBR are a little more
abstract (artistic works rather than engineered planks).

I did find a draft note from SWBPD [2] on Part-Whole relationships,
but this focusses on OWL DL. While I would prefer to stay
DL-consistent, my primary aim is to have data to work with simple
SPARQL queries.

Here's an example of the kind of information I want to represent:

This particular guitar is a one-off custom build, I call it the
Tinocaster. It's generic type would be Stratocaster (which is a Fender
trademark, usually applied to products made by them, but is in common
usage for the style). The pickup in the bridge position is a TV Jones
Magna'Tron, a humbucker. It's in their TV'Tron mount, the traditional
Gibson humbucker form factor.

(There is a fair supply of URIs to use as the object of primaryTopicOf
statements for these things, I'm unsure whether to mint URIs for them
in my own space or simply use bnodes, but that's another thread...).

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://vocab.org/frbr/core
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/SimplePartWhole/

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2007 09:16:03 UTC