Re: vCard - Old vs. New?

Hi Benji,

Picking up on one point:

> If I had anything to conclude, then I'd say that we could benefit from
> some use-case-centric education site where you can pick a use case (not
> a vocab!) and get examples illustrating the combination of possible
> RDF schemas to encode the use case ("simple address book", "people
> with multiple addresses", "social network contacts", ...). Each example
> could mention alternative terms or approaches, and maybe SPARQLy
> mappings between the different vocabs. It would help us, is probably
> nice for beginners, and it would also show that the existence of
> overlapping vocabs with slightly different focus or interpretation
> of a source domain/format doesn't mean "fundamentally flawed approach"
> which we often hear from those centralization lemmings.

During the course of putting together some vocabularies for RDFa
projects I'm working on, I created a Google Code project called
'argot-hub' [1] which seems to take some steps along the path you are
describing.

I've used the term 'argot' to describe a collection of terms for a
particular purpose. They don't necessarily all belong to the same
vocabulary, but by grouping them together, it makes it easier for
people to get a handle on the terms that they might use in a
particular context.

All of the current argots are simple wiki pages, but for the most
recent argot I'm working on (for a new project), I've used OWL and
SKOS, embedded in HTML via RDFa.

My main reason for this is that users need to be able to check their
use of the argots, beyond just seeing if they have the RDFa correct,
and the best way I could think of to do that was to use OWL.
(Actually, the best way I could think of was to use RIF, and after
spending many happy hours trying to find my way around the RIF
specifications, I concluded -- hopefully correctly -- that I can
derive RIF rules from OWL. So my first step would appear to be to code
up the argots using OWL.)

A by-product of using RDFa in HTML to specify the argots is of course
that I can transform the documents into the same kind of wiki pages
that I have now.

Obviously it's early days, and the argots on the site so far are those
that relate to the UK government RDFa projects I've been working on
(covering job vacancies and government consultations), but I'd welcome
any suggestions on how the argot idea in general can progress. Also,
now that I'm using SKOS and OWL, I'm sure there is a lot of best
practice that I can follow, so any pointers there would also be
useful.

It hopefully goes without saying that if anyone wants to actually add
some argots I'd be more than happy to work to make that happen.

Regards,

Mark

[1] <http://argot-hub.googlecode.com/>

-- 
Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck

webBackplane is a trading name of Backplane Ltd. (company number
05972288, registered office: 2nd Floor, 69/85 Tabernacle Street,
London, EC2A 4RR)

Received on Thursday, 7 May 2009 19:41:00 UTC