[DPF] Property Declarations

Hi Dan,

This message contains a response to comments on

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-DPF-20041122/

How do DPF adopters publish and publicise their DPF property  
namespaces? Do you have an mechanism/plans/roadmap to allow  
properties to be documented in some form other than human-oriented  
prose? eg. from B1: DPF.location.format="postal code";

Who defines the property 'location'? In practice, what do they do to  
tell users of the property that it's correct value is an entity that  
has properties such as 'format'. I assume some namespace mechanism  
disambiguates 'location' and 'format' by associating them with URIs,  
but am unclear how this alone is enough to support the loosly- 
coupled, multi-party heterogenous extensibility that DPF seems to aim  
for.

If I'm a DPF adopter and want to publicise a property that applies to  
locations, and I've somehow found the URI for this 'location'  
property, what do I do? Pretend my new property is  
danbri:averageRainfall, and I've a domain name etc etc I can assign  
to it. What can I do, in a machine-readable (and hence more I18N- 
friendly than prose) way to say that my danbri:averageRainfall  
property is intended to apply to the kind of thing that b1:location  
takes as its value? How do we help DPF adopters, many of whom won't  
read English, from mis-using the 'location' property, eg. by using it  
with textual strings values. Can XML schema languages be used  
somehow? RDF/RDFS/OWL? Is new work planned in this area?

This is related to my questions above of course, since RDF/RDFS/OWL  
might serve as an already-existing property declaration mechanism,  
assuming the datamodels match up. But it could well be the case that  
RDF doesn't suit your WG's needs, or even that figuring out whether  
it is usable could be too expensive an undertaking. I intend the  
questions above as small steps towards figuring out how DPF and RDF  
might inter-relate, rather than as evangelism/advocacy to persuade  
you all to "go over to RDF"!

So I should stress that while I'm clearly coming at this problem  
space from the RDF tradition, I don't yet know enough about DPF.  
These are my initial reactions on reading the WD, basically that it  
would be good to be able to consume DPF data in RDF environments,  
since RDF is also based around a hetergenous model for properties.  
And also that there are many RDF-defined properties already in  
existence, some of which might address DPF usage scenarios. I'd like  
to be able to advice RDF and DPF adopters on whether a single  
property URI/namespace can be used, and if not, have some explanation  
to offer them to account for apparent duplication.

Response:

DPF does not of itself define any vocabularies. It relies on other  
specifications, such as CC/PP, UAProf and CPC to provide appropriate  
vocabularies.

-Keith Waters

Received on Thursday, 23 June 2005 13:06:34 UTC