Re: newbie modelling question

Paul Downey wrote -
> ...
> Joe Bloggs represented BT on the FooSpec but took the
> yankee dollar and worked for Microsoft on the BarSpec.
> 
> So i need to express which company a person was working
> for when they edited a given spec, a triple in which one
> of the nodes is a pair of values ..
> 
> What's the best way of saying this in RDF?

You are right, it is a modeling question, and not unique to rdf.  There is probably no "best" way, because "best" is relative to what you want to accomplish.

In this case, a spec is worked on by one or more editors, or let's say one or more persons playing an editor's role.  However, you haven't modeled the editor yet.  An editor, according to what you seem to be interested, has the following properties -

- A person's identifier (who is playing this role);
- An employer or other organization that the person represents;
- A time period during which the person played the role;
- Possibly some indication of the kind of editor, such as chief editor, copy editor, etc.

For this example in rdf, the best approach is probably to create a bnode and attach all these properties.  You could assign a type to the bnode, say "Editor" (of course, make up a suitable URI for it), and the predicate might be "editedBy", again using a URI).

The point, so far as modeling is concerned, is to identity to entities involved, their roles and relationships.  Then you can craft some rdf to represent the model.  In this regard it is no different from modeling for a relational database.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Tuesday, 30 November 2004 16:50:02 UTC