On 12/16/2010 11:04 PM, Renato Iannella wrote:
> If you read FOAF closely, it says that the "Core FOAF" properties "describe characteristics of people and social groups". These include name, title, primaryTopic etc.
>
> So, you would expect to only use these in relation to describing people.
>
Yeah, but there's the problem that "domain A" can only be
understood in terms of how it relates to "domain B", "domain C" and so on.
I got into the semantic web because of my interest in Dbpedia,
Freebase and other things that I call "generic databases". The most
prevalent topics found in generic databases are
* People
* Places, and
* Creative Works
which form a kind of "holy trinity". In the end, since people
have been bulk loading Freebase with information about books, TV
episodes, music tracks, and such, Freebase looks more like a
bibliographic database than anything else.
FOAF was designed by academics (just around the time modern
'social media' was being born) and probably the most important thing you
can say about an academic is what they've published. So it's pretty
natural that a vocabulary for talking about academics is going to place
a special role on Documents. If we go forward a few years to SIOC,
the idea of a Document extends more to blog comments, tweets, photos
on Flickr, etc..
I think it's natural that people are going create vocabularies by
selecting terms from existing vocabularies. BIBO's a good example of
this. It picks from dcterms:, foaf: and a few other namespaces where
they find something appropriate. On the other hand, if you think other
people's vocabulary isn't quite right, you're also free to make your
own predicates.
Something that's bugged me, for instance, is that a big part of
SIOC is about structural metadata. It's very good for going to some
site like say,
http://jalopnik.com/
and explaining the structure of it. Yet, the type system in SIOC
is chauvinistic towards the more frivolous dimension of what people are
doing in social media today... It doesn't have types for whatever the
'next big thing' will be two years from now, and it doesn't have the
right kind of types to describe, say, a PhD thesis published online or
a site like
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
Whenever we create vocabularies that are intended to be shared,
we're always tempted to "close the world" to make the problem
manageable, but we're always confounded by an "open world" that won't
fit in any specific box.
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