In message
<[log in to unmask]
.uk>, "Ottevanger, Jeremy" <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Nice one Nick, that's a brilliant idea. Obviously it's pretty much
>impossible to get complete consensus on start/end date (or even
>existence) of all periods, especially those that vary from place to
>place, but something like this is still really useful.
That's my one reservation about this approach. Nick's thesaurus entry
hard-wires a specific date range into the definition of e.g. "Jurassic".
An ideal approach (IMHO) would abstract out the _concept_ of "Jurassic",
and then allow assertions to be made about that concept. This approach
would accommodate multiple opinions about date ranges, as well as
geographically-specific variants.
>I wonder if it could be held in a collaborative environment of some
>sort.
Something like the Geonames [1] model, perhaps?
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
>Nicholas Crofts
>Sent: 04 October 2009 01:10
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [MCG] BC dates [Scanned]
>
>The CIDOC conference in Santiago has just finished. One of things we
>were talking about was a thesaurus of period names that gives start/end
>time intervals. A lot periods require BCE dates. Geological periods
>obviously won't fit into the four-digit year ISO standard, so this
>isn't ISO compatible.
>
>I've been working on an experimental RESTful webservice version that
>provides data about period names in SKOS format (example below for the
>term "Jurassic"). This is intended to be machine-readable, so it may
>look a bit complicated if you're not familiar with SKOS. The service
>accepts either 'label' or 'id' as a parameter. The label can contain
>wildcards '%'. The top term is "Eternity".
>
>
>The SKOS "prefLabel" tag contains the period name, the "definition" tag
>contains the numerical time interval while the "scopeNote" contains a
>more human friendly version of the interval. Most of the period names,
>scopeNotes, etc. are in both French and English.
>
>I'd be delighted to have any feedback on this.
Some suggestions:
1. It would be useful to include a link to the Dbpedia concept
"Jurassic". Resolving this link gives you the name of the period and a
definition in many languages, a list of fossil groups found in this
period, etc.
2. While your dates are numeric, they aren't particularly
machine-processible. Wouldn't it be better to have separate start- and
end-dates, and a duration? In fact, you could use Christian-Emil Ore's
date-range algebra [2] to denote the range of possible start-dates and
end-dates, using CRM notation
3. As well as the SKOS thesaurus-like relations between periods,
wouldn't it be useful to have CRM-like relations ("contains", "falls
within") to assert their temporal relationships? (CRM doesn't seem to
offer "precedes" and "follows", which would be handy for chaining
contiguous periods together.)
4. It would be nice if your resource was a bit closer to the Linked Data
model, with simpler URLs being used for each concept (e.g.
http://www.open-world.ch/thesaurus/chrono/3185454
instead of
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?id=3185454)
This makes them easier for others to quote. You would need a bit of
server-side URL rewriting to support this approach.
Richard
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoNames
[2] http://cidoc2009.cl/images/documentos/abstracts.pdf, p16-17
--
Richard Light
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