- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 08:04:20 -0500 (EST)
- To: Jeroen Budts <jeroen@lightyear.be>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Jeroen Budts wrote: >I'm still working on my FOAF file and have another question. To give >some extra information about the persons I know (foaf:knows) I want to >add XFN [1]. XFN describes some values which can be used in the @rel >attribute of XHTML elements. I know the rel attribute, as XFN uses it, >is http://gmpg.org/xfn/1#rel. So is it valid then to declare a prefix, >by example xfn, for the namespace http://gmpg.org/xfn/1 and use >xfn:rel as a property for a foaf:Person? Yes, I think you can do this. It seems to be what the document you referred to suggests in its last paragraph. (Assuming that it is a sensible use of the rel property :-) An interesting problem is whether to adapt something like this, or to re-define it yourself. If you take the former appraoch then you either don't write a schema, so people can't find what you did, or you have the possibility that several people will each write a schema for a term whose URI they don't own, and there may be conflicting statements. If you make up your own version, we end up with a million schemas which are likely to have ppor interoperability - even with the core elements of dublin core we can see that establishing interoperability among a large group of humans is difficult. If they all invent their own somewhat nuanced terms and claim they are "similarTo" something else, we will have a very fuzzy semantic web. That may be a good thing of course - the knowledge we try to represent is, except in a few cases, somewhat fuzzy itself. Cheers Chaals
Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2004 08:04:20 UTC