I really disagree with alternative URL patterns and using them in RDF. That
URL pattern is *not* the concept, and whomever generates these URLs is
responsible for maintaining them permanently. A web service like this works
in theory, but I would say that the majority of the LOD-oriented vocabulary
systems used in cultural heritage do not come with SPARQL endpoints. Each
of them offers some flavor of machine-readable data, so you'd have to build
your web service around REST calls for RDF/XML or JSON and building a
mapping from those serializations into Linked Art JSON-LD.

The best solution is to relax CIDOC CRM to allow people to use vocabularies
that aren't built on CIDOC CRM. Domains and ranges should be considered
guidelines, not absolutes. There's nothing technically prohibitive about
inserting CRM linking to Getty URIs describing artistic objects into a
SPARQL endpoint, and also loading those Getty vocabularies into the same
endpoint, and then building SPARQL queries that exploit the capabilities of
both data models. Using property paths in SPARQL are more scalable in
production than activating inferencing engines.

Ethan

On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 7:01 AM Richard Light <rich...@light.demon.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The Linked Art group has been discussing the issue of URIs which point to
> resources in other frameworks (
> https://github.com/linked-art/linked.art/issues/307). The discussion has
> noted the advice in our RDF implementation document (
> http://www.cidoc-crm.org/sites/default/files/Implementing%20the%20CIDOC%20Conceptual%20Reference%20Model%20in%20RDF_0.pdf),
> in particular the advice that skos:Concept should not be used for people or
> places. This raises an issue in relation to ULAN and TGN, two Getty
> vocabularies which Linked Art would expect to be able to use. Various
> work-rounds have been proposed, of varying complexity.
>
> After giving this issue some thought, I contributed the following to the
> discussion:
>
> Interesting problem. This issue will crop up wherever you want to exploit
> the potential of Linked Data by linking out across a 'boundary' to a LD
> resource which plays by different rules to your own. So it's not just a
> Linked Art problem. The alternatives would appear to be:
>
>    - be relaxed about the semantic discontinuity
>    - insist the rest of the LD world changes to fit your world view
>    (which appears to be the CRM SIG position)
>    - cower inside your silo and ignore everything outside it
>    I would argue for adopting the first option. The external resource
>    will still dereference for you; it will still deliver a machine-readable
>    payload. As mentioned above, you won't find any Linked Art or CRM concepts
>    in there, but does that matter?
>    There might be benefit in inventing a relationship for Linked Art
>    which says, in effect, "this is an equivalent but 'external' concept".
>    To go beyond this, assuming that resources such as Geonames will
>    continue to happily ignore our existence, I would suggest a dynamic mapping
>    service, which takes e.g. a Geonames URL, retrieves its contents, and
>    re-expresses those assertions in a CRM-compatible format. Make the call to
>    that service a URL in our Linked Data with the Geonames URL as a parameter,
>    and we will have extended our Linked Data graph to include a virtual
>    CRM-compatible Geonames. Rinse and repeat with other external resources
>    which are big enough to be of interest to us, and too big to re-design
>    along CRM lines.
>
> On reflection, I increasingly like the idea of a dynamic mapping service.
> Maybe we should add something along those lines to the RDF implementation
> document?  The way it would work could be as follows:
>
>
>    - we analyse the RDF which is generated by the external resource and
>    re-express those parts of it which are CRM-compatible in CRM RDF (i.e. do a
>    mapping). Some concepts may not map, and would be excluded from the process
>    - we develop a web service which implements this mapping, taking one
>    URL from the external resource as its input and returning CRM RDF
>    - we support a variant URL pattern which maps to this web service,
>    e.g. https://geonames.cidoc-crm.org/2654308/ for
>    https://www.geonames.org/2654308/burgess-hill.html
>    - CIDOC CRM users quote these variant URLs in their RDF data
>
> This approach makes no demands on the external system; it simply exploits
> the fact that it is providing machine-processible data.  Once installed, it
> will deliver whatever resources are in the external system, i.e. you don't
> need to keep updating your 'copy'.  In effect, it extends the scope of the
> CRM-compatible graph to include this external resource (and all the
> resources that *it *mentions).
>
> Where the external resource has a SPARQL end-point, it may be possible to
> implement the mapping (at least in simple cases) by a suitable CONSTRUCT
> statement.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Richard
> --
> *Richard Light*
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