Re: "Locally-Significant" Statements

On Wednesday 18 Feb 2004 12:12 am, Rhoads, Stephen wrote:

> I would appreciate some guidance as to the best approach to the problem of
> what I will call (for lack of a better term) making locally significant
> statements about a resource.  I have identified three approaches which I am
> calling "Wrapper", "InstanceOf", and "Context".

I'd agree with the others who have commented. My reasoning, so I can benefit 
from criticism if needs be:

The label "locally significant" seems to me to confuse the issue. The 
statements made by all three retailers are globally significant and, if you 
are a price comparison web site or a shopper with more time than money you 
will indeed want to be able to pull all this information together with 
minimum effort. A retailer should be making the assertion "we sell Cheerios 
at price X", not "Cheerios cost X". I guess that this is usually called a 
"product line"? The manufacturer may also wish to assert that "the 
recommended retail price of Cheerios is Y". 

So in general I would say "wrapper" isn't a wrapper, it's just using an 
adequate data model?

As far as instanceOf goes, this adds an extra layer of indirection just as 
"wrapper" does, but it is harder to square with an understanding of the 
general meaning of "instance".

The "context" approach is essentially leaving the extra information to be 
inferred, which rather goes against the point of using RDF. Quotation would 
be useful if you wanted to say that "Retailer X claims to be selling Cheerios 
for price Y", I suppose, which might be something a price comparison web site 
would do (assuming they don't employ someone to go round checking).

Cheers,
Hamish

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2004 10:04:53 UTC