Re: Annotea's context property

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Brent Hendricks wrote:

>Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>> For example I might want to claim that the creator of  document is
>>   <foaf:Person> <foaf:mbox> <mailto:charles@sidar.org> .
>> i.e. the person who has the email address charles@sidar.org, expressed in
>> a way that can be processed by RDF and matched less ambiguously than just a
>> literal. This is legal according to my reading of the schemas.
>
>It may be legal, but I'm not convinced that it's a good idea.  If you
>create an annotation with some arbitrary RDF resource(s) as the value of
>dc:creator, there will be several Annotea clients that won't know what
>to do with it.

In theory this means they are not correctly implementing what is specified -
in general there is no reason in RDF not to do this. Of course, as you say,
that doesn't automatically mean that people will implement it. It would be
good to know which annotea clients can or can't handle this kind of thing
(and servers for that matter).

I assumed in developing my little tools that this would be a possiblity, but
they don't do anything useful yet where it would be an issue. I would prefer
that it was specified that implementations should be able to cope with this
approach, so people could say that their implementation was missing the
capability but people could expect it in the future, or would realise that
this is something to take into account in implementing.

Another possibility is to explicitly specify that the content is a Literal,
but i think there are use cases which show that isn't going to be as helpful
in the long run. A third possibility is to have two vocabularies, where one
is a subset that requires a Literal and the other allows for general RDF
content - if this route is chosen I think that the choice of whether the
existing schema should be one with explicit restrictions or should be the
"full" one can depend on what works best for current implementors (but this
is just my opinion - there may be other good reasons for going one way or the
other that I haven't figured out yet).

I think that this is like your proposal for profiles...

just my 2 cents worth

chaals

Received on Monday, 10 March 2003 11:05:35 UTC