- From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:46:17 +0200
- To: "Garret Wilson" <garret@globalmentor.com>
- Cc: "Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com>, andy.seaborne@hp.com, bnowack@appmosphere.com, "Harry Halpin" <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>, "Semantic Web" <semantic-web@w3.org>
On 30/07/07, Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com> wrote: > OK, this thread is freaking me out. Comments below: > > Bruce D'Arcus wrote: > > > > Just to remind people, Norm made what I consider to be the right > > decision on names originally: restricting the cardinality of the name > > parts to 1. That's pragmatic: simple to encode, to convert in and out > > of the hCard microformat, and simple to query. It's exactly the kind > > of thing that the RDF world needs to be doing more of. > > But think of what you're saying! You're saying that Norm restricted the > cardinality of names to 1, not because that is what most closely models > the semantics of a name, but because it seems nigh impossible to > practically model lists of things in RDF! Does that not make you want to > cry? Sorry, did I miss something here? What I see in Norm's vocab [1] is use of singular properties, but without any cardinality restrictions. A list of names can be expressed as e.g. : _:mycard vCard:fn "Daniel John Ayers" ; vCard:additionalName "Danny Ayers" ; vCard:additionalName "Danny J. Ayers" ; vCard:additionalName "DJ Ayers" ; ... Forgive me for not trawling back along the thread, but I suspect there are two possible reasons explicit lists might have been suggested: cardinality constraint and order. Where these are needed, I'd propose using a kind of out-of-band approach, e.g. _:mycard vCard:approvedNames ( "Daniel John Ayers" "Danny Ayers" ) . In the general case, model-wise, a cardinality constrained list doesn't really seem appropriate (e.g. years back a magazine publisher had me down as "Dan Ayers" without my explicit approval, but I had no objection). RDF Containers introduce additional structural complexity without any benefit as far as I can see. RDF Collections don't play nice with SPARQL and introduce additional structural complexity without any benefit (in the typical case) as far as I can see. Cheers, Danny. [1] http://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/05/vcard -- http://dannyayers.com
Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 09:46:34 UTC