Re: Organizing RDF files

Hi Marjolein,

in a test of RDF scalability, I am more and more using RDF to keep track of
where things are - because I don't consider that my organisational skills are
enough to scale forever, and I don't want things to get moved around nor
lost.

The approach I have been working with is using something like annotea -
http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea - so that I simply tell a server to record
that some file is an annotation on some other, and some RDF to describe the
relationship. Then I can query the server for information about a resource,
and get back what I told it. (If it implements a query language like algae,
as the W3C's example server does, I can ask for all kinds of particular
information, or just everything that has been recorded.)

The other benefit I find in the annotea approach is that I can annotate
things that aren't mine to change - this is something that it shares with
other annotation systems.

Discussion of Annotea takes place on the www-annotation@w3.org list -
archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-annotation/ - most
recently including updates to the protocol, and working on a "dummmies
installation guide" for the ZAnnot annotea server.

Cheers

Chaals

On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, Marjolein Katsma wrote:

>
>Hi All,
>
>This is more a practical question than a question about RDF per se, but I
>think it might still be interesting for this list. (If not, just ignore
>this question or reply off-list.)
>
>It's easy to see that once you're starting to describe a lot of things, the
>number of RDF files grows with the number of things described, too - maybe
>even faster. I'm trying to think of a good way to organize mine (before I
>find I need to re-organize them because I didn't think beforehand :)) so I
>wonder how others are doing this.
>
>One approach might be to store RDF files with the "things" they describe;
>but that would break down when you're describing relationships between
>things that themselves are in different places. So - I think I want to keep
>all RDF files in a separate location.
>
>But then - I'll have an RDF file describing a catalog of products, RDF
>files describing products or versions of products, RDF files describing
>distribution packages... I could organize them in a tree of directories
>according to their purpose, or I could have themall in a single directory
>and devise a naming scheme that would (for instance) tell me whether an RDF
>file is for a product version (describing what it _is_) or for a
>distribution package for that same product version (describing what it
>contains - and there could be several distriibutions for a single product
>version). I'm simplifying, of course :)
>
>Now I could just pick a method to organize the files and stick with it but
>I'd be interested in hearing how others do it - I reckon I could learn from
>others who've been through this process already. And maybe people use
>different methods so it would be interesting to hear why they use one, and
>not another, approach, and others just the opposite.
>
>So: how do you organize a (growing) bunch of RDF files - and why do you do
>it that way? Does it depend on th eapplication (what you're using the RDF
>files for) or is it just an organization method you prefer ingeneral?
>
>Oh - and maybe I should also ask: do you use RDF to describe how you organize your RDF files? ;-)
>

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 03:52:19 UTC