On 6/7/2010 12:12 PM, Ed Summers wrote: > On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Lee Passey<l...@novomail.net> wrote: >> So before any questions about how best to represent a person in RDF can >> be addressed, you should try to find out who will be consuming the data, >> and what their expectations are. > > I think this is an important point, and is largely why I'm in favor of > leveraging existing vocabularies for people (foaf) in the rdf views, > so that ol authors fit into the existing ecosystem of rdf data about > people, some of whom happen to have written books.
Can you give us a better description of this "ecosystem?" What existing, or in-development, applications would consume OL data? What would they use it for? It seems to me that the proposed preference for FOAF, with its accompanying incompleteness, is mostly speculative at this point; that is, /if/ OL provided data using the FOAF vocabulary, and /if/ future applications had a use for OL data /then/ something useful could happen. But what if the predicates never materialize? Thus the question, "what applications currently exist or are likely to exist imminently, that desire to consume OL data, and what are their requirements?" Until this gating question is answered, at least provisionally, any attempts to decide on an RDF vocabulary is premature. On the other hand, if there are no current or imminent applications, then it seems to me the answers to the vocabulary selection question are: 1. pick anything you want, because no one will be using it anyway, and 2. why are you wasting developer time on an effort for which there is no demand? On the third hand, XSLT is a powerful enough scripting language that transformations from any arbitrary XML vocabulary, even non-RDF vocabularies, to any other XML vocabulary, are trivial. Simply pick or invent an XML vocabulary that encodes all of the data stored in the OL record sets. When someone comes to you and asks for a different transfer encoding, simply hand him/her the XSLT script that transforms the OL encoding to whatever the target encoding needs to be (or if demand is great enough, run the XSLT on the server side via a Java servlet); of course, you won't know what the target encoding needs to be until someone comes to you and asks for it. The key here is that the XML encoding /must/ carry /all/ of the data currently stored in the OL record sets, which is something that the current RDF API does not do. In my opinion, completeness trumps conformance to any particular vocabulary. _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
