Re: Writing CIDOC in N3

Hi Mark,

Butler, Mark wrote:

> Hi Martin
> 
> This is a quick note first to say thank you for lending us the LUPA data for
> SIMILE,

Welcome!

> 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.

Also welcome!


> 
> 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 CIDOC CRM (short "CRM", because CIDOC is a Committee
of ICOM)is not the RDFS we use in the examples. The CRM is deliberately defined
independent from any encoding, see for the latest draft: http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/docs/cidoc_crm_version_3.4.7.doc
The RDFS form we use here is only a possible encoding with some minor short-comings (symmetry
of property declarations, properties of properties). Therefore the CIDOC CRM
itself in not incompatible with any encoding.

Me too, I read neither XML nor RDF. Normally we use an xsl stylesheet
to make either one readable, which is normally quite satisfactory, but needs
some effort for each schema. 

 
> 
> 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? 


Please feel free to make any such changes. As long as there is an algorithm to
transform from one form into the other, we regard it as CRM compatible. You
are welcome to give us a transformation to an N3 compatible encoding. We shall
publish it on our Website. It is our declared policy to support all reasonable
encodings.

> 
> [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/

Best regards,

Martin
> 
> 
> 


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Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2003 05:16:55 UTC