- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 03:22:00 -0400 (EDT)
- To: <www-annotation@w3.org>
- cc: <rdfweb-dev@egroups.com>
(copying RDFWeb list for info / archival) I've been looking again at modelling strategies for recommending real-world objects in RDF apps, trying to figure out how (if at all) the Annotea or ILRT RDF annotation systems might be tweaked to better do this. So here are some rough notes / proposals regarding restaurant reviews. This topic cropped up on the collaborative filtering list a while back, and is now all the more interesting because of the existence of ChefMoz, the Open Directory database of restaurant reviews and descriptions. http://chefmoz.dmoz.org/ http://chefmoz.dmoz.org/rdf.html (free data dumps) (based on the http://dmoz.org/rdf.html main open directory rdf dumps) I believe restaurant reviews provide a very useful use case for RDF annotations (and modelling generally), since they force us to distnguish between the description of the restaurant and the description of the web pages / web site run by that restaurant. Annotea and similar vocabularies are excellent for the latter task -- the challenge will be to find a way to do RDF annotations in a way that is both cross domain (ie. does restaurants, jobs, CVs...) and that integrates with document-oriented annotation systems. Last year Libby Miller and I sketched a technique for doing something similar in the context of RSS (RDF Site Summary), showing how RSS data feeds could be used to syndicate information about Jobs, in a way that distinguished the job (and its properties) from a Web page advertising that job. I propose that a very similar technique could work for us in the annotations field, ie. that we can extend our document-oriented annotation vocabs in a way that allows job, restaurant etc information to be plugged in. The RSS proposal is at http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/11/rss-query/ ('Extending and querying RSS channels'). The basic idea I have in mind for "doing jobs, food etc" is to use a node standing for the restaurant or whatever, and make up[ a generic relation between that and a page or document described using something like the Annotea vocab. The relation could be called 'foaf:homepage' or whatever; in the RSS example we used 'advertises', which is rather application specific. We would also need to have RDF classes representing the many kinds of thingwhose online representation we were annotating. I propose that we can use WordNet for this. For example: http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Restaurant http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Job http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Song http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Video http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/... etc. This would provide us with 1000s of category terms for use with RDF annotations, arranged in a hierarchy. Restaurants would be a special case of a general representational strategy: annotations would either be directly about some document or document sub-section, or else be about "the Restaurant/Job/Song/Video/... whose foaf:homepage is [document URI]". IMHO this modelling strategy provides better attachment points for the kind of information available for eg in the DMoz data (see http://chefmoz.org/elements/1.0/). OK that was a bit rambly, hope I'm making some kind of sense here! I should also mention that I have just written a little converter that can translate between the Squish RDF query language (see RSS paper above) and the Algy language used in EricP's RDF server (ie. Annotea). So I'm hopeful that we can start doing some concrete testing of vocabulary design ideas soon, and through that come to a better understanding of the tradeoffs concerned... Dan
Received on Sunday, 6 May 2001 03:23:30 UTC