Re: naming properties and classes in RDF

* Libby Miller
|
| I'm not concerned with the syntax, I'm bothered that designing
| schemas which have similar or identical names for certain properties
| and classes is confusing for authors, and also seems...wrong.  It's
| not clear that you need to know both the sort of link between two
| entities and the typing information about the entities. The latter
| doesn't seem to add anything, except maybe in some visualizations
| where it may clarify what you are looking at. For certain queries it
| might enable you to make finer distinctions (but for most queries
| I've done, and certainly in this schema which is very flat, typing
| in queries is not needed).
| 
| Does this ring any bells with anyone?

It certainly does. The openwine.org data are structured this way, and
trying to decipher that schema made me think of one of the mazes in
Adventure: 

  "You're in a maze of little, twisty passages, all slightly
  different."

I agree completely that naming the properties after the type of
resource that can be a value of the property is confusing. For one
thing, it can make it very hard to find out what the classes really
mean. For simple and obvious schemas this probably doesn't matter, but
for real-life schemas it can be hell.

In some cases you may also have different relationships with
properties of the same type, and in that case this way of naming
properties just breaks down. Try it with Person, for example... :)

--Lars M.

Received on Monday, 19 November 2001 17:04:45 UTC