Re: Amico Corpus

Butler, Mark wrote:

>>Personally I 
>>prefer the 
>>first form except for the 'Owner' versus 'owner' distinction which is 
>>lost to me.  Indeed, why not:
>>
>><Paintings rdf:about = "WMAA.70.1650">
>>  <Title>(Self-Portrait)</Title>
>>  <owner>
>>    <Organization rdf:about =
>>"http://www.amico.org/laf/entities/whitney_museum_of_american_art">
>>      <name>Whitney Museum of American Art</name>
>>    </Organization>
>>    <accessionNumber rdf:resource = "70.1650" />
>>    <place>New York, New York, USA</place>
>>    <credit>Josephine N. Hopper Bequest</credit>
>>  </owner>
>></Paintings>
>>    
>>
>
>Because that's not legal RDF. It breaks the striped syntax of RDF/XML,
>because you've got
>
>Class
>	Property
>	Property
>		Class
>			Property
>		Property
>		Property
>		Property
>
>you can't have property property, it has to be class property class property
>etc ...
>  
>
Ah, thanks for the education.  I hadn't been thinking of the 
intermediate layers as properties (ie predicates), but with that 
distinction it becomes clear that you can't create a graph, one 
end-point of which is an arc. 

>Yes the owner / Owner distinction is horrible and ugly, but unfortuately
>it's necessary due to the current RDF/XML syntax. The only way to overcome
>it is to use rdf:parseType="Resource" e.g. 
>
><Paintings rdf:about = "WMAA.70.1650">
>  <Title>(Self-Portrait)</Title>
>  <owner rdf:parseType="Resource">
>    <organization>
>	<rdf:Description rdf:about
>="http://www.amico.org/laf/entities/whitney_museum_of_american_art">
>      	<name>Whitney Museum of American Art</name>
>	</rdf:Description>
>    </organization>
>    <accessionNumber rdf:resource = "70.1650" />
>    <place>New York, New York, USA</place>
>    <credit>Josephine N. Hopper Bequest</credit>
>  </owner>
></Paintings>
>
>(An aside: personally, I think this is further proof of how confusing the
>striped syntax is, and I note that in XML people would naturally encode the
>above as follows:
>
><painting ID = "WMAA.70.1650">
>  <title>(Self-Portrait)</title>
>  <owner>
>    <organization ID
>="http://www.amico.org/laf/entities/whitney_museum_of_american_art">
>    	<name>Whitney Museum of American Art</name>
>    </organization>
>    <accessionNumber ID = "70.1650" />
>    <place>New York, New York, USA</place>
>    <credit>Josephine N. Hopper Bequest</credit>
>  </owner>
></painting>
>
>If the serialisation above was valid RDF/XML, I think people would have less
>difficulty writing RDF/XML. A number of people have made proposals along
>these lines, I enclose I did a while back for anyone who is interested.)
>
>  
>
I've long found the RDF/XML encoding somewhat confusing, but was never 
able to put my finger on why it kept confusing me.  I think I've spent 
too much time with XML, and not enough with RDF/XML.  With that 
clarified, I think that Andy's note is right on target.

-- 
========================================================
   Kevin Smathers                kevin.smathers@hp.com    
   Hewlett-Packard               kevin@ank.com            
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Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2003 12:25:25 UTC