Can an XPath expression be considered as a

During the development of the new generation of IPTC (International
Press Telecommunications Council), IPTC members decided to use XPath
expressions to point at internal node sets in an XML instance, in a way
similar to the XSLT template/@match feature.

 

We especially use this for indicating a reference to the part(s) of the
content a metadata property is about, e.g. (I admit that this is a
complex case):

 

<newsItem>

<subject about="//*[@id='person1' or @id='person2']" confidence="80">

            <name>Georges W. Bush</name>

</subject> 

<subject about="//*[@id='person1' or @id='person2']" confidence="20">

            <name>Georges Herbert Walker Bush</name>

</subject> 

...

<html><body><p>xxx xxx <span id="person1">President Bush</span> xx. Yyy
yy yy<span id="person2">the US President</span> yyy.</p></body></html>

</newsItem>

 

The use of XPath allows us to make assertions about several pieces of
text at once (an alternative would be to use id/idrefs relations, but
the problem explained below would be the same).

 

Now our problem: we want to be able to transform such assertions to RDF
triples. The subject of the triple is a piece of text: can an XPath
expression be an acceptable identifier for an RDF subject (my take is
that it must be a URI, and an XPath expression is not a URI)? 

If not, what are the good triples we can get from such a structure? I
looked at Annotea to find guidelines, and found that the piece of text
(represented by an XPointer in Annotea) is the value of the context
property of a resource which is the annotation itself (see
http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/Plan/context/newcontext.html). Is it the
SemWeb definitive view on it?

 

Laurent Le Meur

AFP

IPTC News Architecture WP chair

 





This e-mail, and any file transmitted with it, is confidential and  intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you have received this email in error, please  contact the sender and delete the email from your system. If you are  not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy  this email.

For more information on Agence France-Presse, please visit our web site at http://www.afp.com

Received on Saturday, 16 June 2007 13:25:39 UTC