[ckan-discuss] Next version of the LOD cloud diagram. Please provide input, so that your dataset is included.

Thu Sep 9 01:33:02 BST 2010

William Waites wrote:
> On 10-09-08 22:33, John Bywater wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps mistakenly, I would hazard a guess that it's just a form field
>> issue.
> 
> No, it is a data model issue.
> 
>> Could I ask, which form field (or fields) would be preferred instead of
>> the existing email form field?
>>
>> Would a free text field be preferable? Or is there an RDF form which
>> allows exactly the balance of degrees of constraints and degrees of
>> freedom which would satisfy each and every user, regardless of what kind
>> of thing they are trying to record?
> 
> Yes there is. First you decide on a predicate (attribute name). You have
> to decide on what you mean by author. A natural choice might be
> "creator" from the Dublin Core terms [0].
> 
> The range of dc:creator is is dc:Agent. So your value is a URI that
> identifies the Agent. This behaves somewhat like a foreign key into
> another table. The agent has properties that describe it such as its
> email address, home page, name, etc., whatever is required.
> 
> You don't constrain which properties the Agent might have a priori
> in the data model - it is always possible to add another predicate,
> indeed someone somewhere else can add another predicate without
> consulting you. This is an important point. The data is *not* kept
> only in your storage. You might constrain the list for convenience
> in making an HTML form to enter information about the agent.
> 
> Some predicates enable you to disambiguate Agents that might have
> been given different URIs for some reason, they are called inverse
> functional properties. foaf:mbox is one of them, foaf:openid is
> another. But this is a more complicated topic, let's get the basics
> down first.
> 
> [0] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-creator
> 
> 

Thanks for that. I remember now that I did make acquaintance with the 
Dublin Core several years ago. It doesn't seem to have changed all that 
much.

My question was: since you don't like email form fields, which form 
fields would you prefer to see instead?

J.