Writing CIDOC in N3

Hi Martin

This is a quick note first to say thank you for lending us the LUPA data for
SIMILE, second to say that I found your paper "Semantic Problems of
Thesaurus Mapping" very interesting and I would like to discuss it with you
at some point in the future.

I'm only just starting to look at CIDOC and the LUPA data, but unfortunately
I have discovered there is an incompatibility between CIDOC and N3. On
SIMILE I am using N3 to inspect data because I find it is much more human
readable than RDF/XML. 

The incompatibility arises because N3 uses periods in a specific way - see
[1] - and CIDOC uses periods in the fragment part of class names and
property names. Therefore it is not possible for N3 to abbreviate these
names. For example it would be nice if this piece of N3

<OID:LUPA.945>
      a
<http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/rdfs/cidoc_crm_v3.4.rdfs#E42.Object_Identifier> .

could be abbreviated to

<OID:LUPA.945>
      a       cidoc:E42.Object_Identifier .

However this is not possible because of confusion about the meaning of the
periods. 

Now admittedly this could be regarded as a problem with N3, and some people
would argue against using N3 at all as it is not an official standard. I
wonder if there is any possibility at that CIDOC could adopt another
separator, e.g. a hyphen or an underscore instead of the period as this
would avoid the problem? Using XSLT 2, sed or Perl, I think it would be a
fairly simple matter to write a short script that could rewrite the CIDOC
schema and instance data in this form? I could assist with this? 

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2003Feb/0071.html

kind regards

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Monday, 3 November 2003 11:06:03 UTC