Dear Robert,
On 1/22/2018 7:12 PM, Robert Sanderson wrote:
An interesting investigation would be to try and reuse existing terms
from well-known ontologies, rather than creating yet another one.
To Martin’s point about just renaming all the things … that sounds
easy in theory, but in the distributed real world of implementations
and datasets, in practice it means that everyone needs to support all
of the different permutations as there’s always some product or some
piece of data that hasn’t updated to the most recent version.
It is not about renaming all things, it is about not excluding renaming
while preserving the identification code.
An unchanged standard is an illusion, a fiction not worthwhile sticking
to. I use to present it this way:
Making Standards
The good with standards is there are so many!
When you have a standard,
You need to transform to the standard
You need to renew and adapt the standard
You need to transform to the renewed standards
Why not just transform data?
There are too many transformations, you need a standard
One small benefit would be that new serializations like JSON-LD would
have more liberty to assert their own mappings over top of the
alphanumeric designations, rather than feeling beholden to the
labels. Of course for every other serialization it’s going to be
completely unintelligible and thereby unusable.
The challenge is a) to understand that mapping, not the standard is the
ultimate solution
b) how to standardize the mapping
c) to minimize the needs to map
Best,
Martin
Rob
*From: *Crm-sig <crm-sig-boun...@ics.forth.gr> on behalf of Richard
Light <rich...@light.demon.co.uk>
*Date: *Monday, January 22, 2018 at 6:37 AM
*To: *"crm-sig@ics.forth.gr" <crm-sig@ics.forth.gr>
*Subject: *Re: [Crm-sig] ISSUE Form and persistence of RDF identifiers
On 19/01/2018 13:36, Martin Doerr wrote:
Dear All,
We never continue an alphanumeric designation when there is a
significant change in definition. You can take for granted that
continuing the
designation means that the change is not significant.
The case below (P148) should be due to an internal processing
problem, and will never reoccur. It is characteristically the last
property of this edition.
The reason, if I am not wrong, was that we got out of sync with
the ISO version with the latest changes. Since the ISO team does
in general not respect our
continuity concerns when there was parallel work, we had some
times the bitter choice between our continuity and not to create a
different branch from ISO for
typical reasons. Probably should have been explicitly justified.
OK, thanks for the explanation. Though I don't understand why 'ISO'
(who, exactly?) was doing active development work on the CRM. I
thought that they simply took the SIG's work through the ISO
formalization process.
Since we have discussed for years the issues with changing labels,
I repeat quickly the reasons:
Labels are taken for mnemonics, and people associate, even they
shouldn't, semantics with it.
Therefore labels change when they render better the concept and
serious misunderstandings can be reduced following explicit
community requests.
The fact that the alphanumeric code is continued, marks absolutely
clear that this is a change of name and not meaning.
Labels are also translated, and work as mnemonics of the
respective language.
Therefore labels are not part of the definition.
The rest are considerations of use, and a question of utilities,
which cannot dictate our practice.
Anyone working in an IT environment should have access to someone
doing the trivial task of mapping label changes in his S/W,
if he has chosen to include labels in the URIs without "same_as"
statements. Please consider in your requirements, that continuity
of meaning is as important as comprehensibility. We cannot follow
advise which considers only one side of the medal.
I think that this argument is perfectly valid for the 'Definition of
CRM' document. However, by publishing an RDFS expression of the CRM
we are moving, whether we like it or not, into the realm of
'utilities'. People are picking up and using our RDFS definitions in a
variety of ways. In this particular implementation context, I would
argue that we should ensure that there is a label-free version of each
CRM class and property. Also, our guidance on the use of our RDFS
implementation should recommend the use of this label-free version, on
the grounds that we cannot guarantee the stability of the version
which includes a label.
This talk of preferred labels and your mention of the labels in other
languages leads me to wonder whether anyone has produced a SKOS
version of the CRM. This might be a useful exposition of the logic of
the CRM, expressed in a format which is widely used and supported. We
could have 'preferred labels' for each concept in as many languages as
we like. A SKOS version would be no use for instance data, because
each SKOS concept is itself an instance, in OWL terms, but it might be
a powerful tool for expressing relationships between concepts in
different schemes, i.e. exactly the purpose for which the CRM was
originally created. Thoughts, anyone?
Best wishes,
Richard
F10 was deliberately declared as "F" in FRBRoo to be an FRBRoo
concept "same as" E21, for didactic reasons. There is no
continuity break.
Please let me know if there is anything wrong with this.
All the best,
Martin
--
*Richard Light*
_______________________________________________
Crm-sig mailing list
Crm-sig@ics.forth.gr
http://lists.ics.forth.gr/mailman/listinfo/crm-sig
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr | Vox:+30(2810)391625 |
Research Director | Fax:+30(2810)391638 |
| Email: mar...@ics.forth.gr |
|
Center for Cultural Informatics |
Information Systems Laboratory |
Institute of Computer Science |
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) |
|
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, |
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece |
|
Web-site: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl |
--------------------------------------------------------------
