Re: requesting feeback about urls for a library catalog

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 09:08:31PM +1000, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Just an email to ask a few question to clarify the purpose of some of
> these things before we get to the meat of things ;
> 
> > <data>/<id>#foaf:Person identifies a person
> 
> Why does #foaf:Person identify the <id> as a person? Can the same id
> also have a different type?

http://data.thelibrary.com/1234/victor_hugo is the url of a document
that describes the person, describes its work, and links to other
documents that provide detailed information about the two.

http://data.thelibrary.com/1234#foaf:Person is the url of the person
itself.

http://data.thelibrary.com/1234#skos:Concept is the url of the concept
associated to that person in the concept hierarchy of the catalog. For
the catalog is made of concepts, not persons and organizations.

Triples could be:

<data>/1234#foaf:Person dc:author <data>/5678#frbr:Work
<data>/1234#skos:Concept foaf:focus <data>/1234#foaf:Person
<data>/1234#foaf:Person foaf:page <data>1234/victor_hugo/

> > <data>/<id>#frbr:Work identifies a work
> 
> Are you doing the full FRBR monty, or just a few select?

A good part of it.

> > http://data.thelibrary.com/1234/victor_hugo
> 
> So this is a readable name version of http://data.thelibrary.com/1234/?

Yes.

> What does readable mean?

A url like <data>/1234 will not help you or me figure out what might
be the GET-able document about.

I know Victor Hugo is a french author, thus <data>/1234/victor_hugo
tells me I will GET a document about that person.

> > <data>/1234 redirects via HTTP 303 to <data>/1234/readable_name
> 
> Why?

Because cut-n-pasting a url like <data>/1234#foaf:Person into your
browser will get you a document describing that person.

> > <data>/1234/readable_name redirects via HTTP 301 to <data>/1234/readable_name/
> 
> Why?

Because we want a single url for the generic document.

Inspiration came from Apache that does a 301 when serving a directory:
somedir -> somedir/ -> chains with content negotiation.

> > <data>/1234/victor_hugo/en.html
> > <data>/1234/victor_hugo/rdf.xml
> 
> What would the language of the XML be? Or are they implicitly multi-lingual?

Yes, RDF representations would be multi-lingual (or default to
english), at least in a first step. Currently, we do not have
rdf.en.xml that would have strings in english and rdf.fr.xml that
would have strings in french.

> Just a few questions before I condemn the use of anchors in
> identifiers, berate FRBR as an RDF model and generally wince about
> typification. :) No, not really. Well, just a bit. But do tell a bit
> more about the logic behind your choices. What are you trying to
> achieve? What clients would use and benefit from your choices?

You are right the above does not come out of the blue, here is an
example before you start condemning and berating and wincing :)

http://viaf.org/viaf/9847974/#Hugo,_Victor,_1802-1885
http://viaf.org/viaf/9847974/rdf.xml

in the latter, you will read uris like

http://libris.kb.se/resource/auth/206651#concept
http://viaf.org/viaf/sourceID/SELIBR%7C206651#skos:Concept
http://viaf.org/viaf/9847974/#foaf:Person
etc.

There is also a lot to read at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/
including a mailing-list on which I could post my question, but my
goal was to get feedback from the "general semantic web public" rather
than talk to people who have been working on exactly the same topic
for the past year. The data comes from a public library and the goal
is to have a broad as reuse as possible, so it has to be
comprehensible by everyone.

-- 
Nicolas Chauvat

logilab.fr - services en informatique scientifique et gestion de connaissances

Received on Wednesday, 8 June 2011 13:07:21 UTC