Hi, I'm working on vocabulary for RDFa metadata on
http://ookaboo.com/
and have run into a little problem.
Now, if we look at a page like
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/170657/NASA
That's a URL for a web page, but there's an informative URL
http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/topic/170657/NASA#it
which represents "NASA" itself. Then I could say
ookaboo:/topic/170657/NASA dcterms:subject ookaboo:/topic/17067/NASA#it.
or
ookaboo:/topic/170657/NASA dcterms:subject dbpedia:NASA
for that matter. Now, quite a few well-respected vocabularies define
sub-properties of dcterms:subject. For instance, sioc:topic and
previously skos:subject. Subproperties such as sioc:topic seem to add
no value in my book, but as a content publisher I've always got the
anxiety that content consumers are going to accept one predicate and not
accept the other.
Now, there's also foaf:topic, which one could argue is an improvement
on dcterms:subject, since it specifies reasonable domain and range
limits. FOAF also includes foaf:primaryTopic which is a further
extension of the concept. foaf:topic doesn't have any official
relationship to dcterms:subject, but practically it almost means the
same thing... If I was designing something to accept RDF from the
outside world, I'd probably treat these the same way, perhaps putting
some priority on foaf:topic, since having the range limited to a
resource is a good thing.
BIBO, at the very least, takes a reasonable stand on this and avoids
some of the worst sorts of proliferation: it picks dcterms:subject
instead of defining its own, and also uses some terms from FOAF such as
foaf:Person, but it rejects foaf:topic.
As both a consumer and producer of linked data, I'm disturbed by the
"multiple ways to say things" -- I'm more interested in building systems
that work than in compliance to particular standards. As a consumer, I
feel like I have to accept anything I might find, but as a producer, I
can easily see an exponential explosion of triples that I publish if I
tried to publish every reasonable version of what I'm trying to say.
Any thoughts?
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