[vcard] OWL or RDF for vCard?

Currently one distinguishing characteristic between the earlier vCard
note [1] and the new work in progress [2] is that the earlier one is in
vanilla RDF while the latter is in OWL. However, is needed?

My reasoning is that OWL, while I agree is absolutely wonderful, may be
a bit of an overkill for a simple vCard format.

1) First, we hope people who aren't RDF/OWL/SemWeb experts and who are
from the microformat community will use this as an middling exchange
document, and it seems that forcing people to learn about the
differences between expressivity in OWL and RDF is a bit much.

2) Second, on second thought,  I don't think we need the expressivity.
The only feature we're using in OWL is its cardinality constraints, and
the places where we use constraints, such as giving a Location 1 lat and
long, seems to make sense, but at other places such as a v:Name having
only 1 v:family-name, (given the complexity of names!) this constraint
doesn't make sense. Also, the original Note [1] was very clear about how
great RDF was at allowing us to avoid all this by just putting things in
bags and lists, and I think for simplicities sake removing all
constraints would be easiest, allwing one to have organizations with
multiple lats and longs, as well as people with multiple family-names,
perhaps in different languages.

What do people think? Keep it in OWL? Are all the cardinality
constraints Norm has right?

Or move it to RDF and throw cardinality constraints out the window?



 

-- 
		-harry

Harry Halpin,  University of Edinburgh 
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin 6B522426

Received on Monday, 5 February 2007 06:47:20 UTC