AW: Literals representing people?

ahhemm,

this sounds like a sophisticated theoretical discussion here.

Did anybody of you program with dublin core already ?

I did, and I looked at this 

dc:Creator
" Examples of a Creator include a person, an organisation,
                    or a service.  Typically, the name of a Creator
should 
                    be used to indicate the entity."

thought for a minute about it and dumped it.

And made my own properties for source, author, etc.
which have 
rdfs:range="rdf:Resource"
(i called it vienna-core :-)

or look at FOAF by Libby Miller & Dan Brickley
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/

they had discussion like this:
"hey, if i have 
<person> <firstname> "dan", <lastname> "brickley";
i can identify him and don't need a URI for the person, the person can
be an anonymous resource and i query it by searching for <firstname> and
<lastname> match" "no, you have to have a uri identifying him. Use his
email" "no, email is identifying a mailbox, not a person" (this is made
up by me but some discussions where like that)

my idea of this is to find ANY uri that fits to identify a person (also
a homepage url).


BECAUSE :

forget identifying things, people, items, objects by Literals. 
That is over. 
don't do it. 
please. 
in the Semantic Web it is better to identify resources by URIs.

Thats my experience, because if you do literals , the whole idea of a
global network of information is gone and will not work. You have to use
URIs to identify resources, a Person is a resource, so identify it with
a URI, also reference the resource by its URI. 
A human readable "name" can then by received by querying rdfs:label or
the like of the resource. Dublin Core will someday change to that,
(educated guess, I hope they will).

You can have more than one URI for the same person, and use
owl:sameIndividualAs to connect them.

Identify people by email address or any other URI (f.e. homepage) but
not using Literals.

if we use literals, everything will be more complicated.


!!! try it out, write some Jena code and see how you minimize effort....
!!!

greetings
Leo Sauermann
www.gnowsis.com

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 06:22:11 UTC