[open-literature] Open Correspondence RDF

Fri Nov 5 09:05:35 UTC 2010

Hi Keith,

Thanks for the comments.

On 05/11/2010 03:37, Keith Alexander wrote:
> First of all, the URIs you use for the letters are the same URIs you
> use for the web pages showing the letters. It would be really useful
> to make new URIs for the letters so that, eg, you can clearly say that
> Dickens wrote the letter, and you created the web page displaying the
> letter.
> In the sample RDF I sketched out, I used the URI
> <http://www.opencorrespondence.org/letters/resource/dickens/Miss_Hogarth/603>
> to identify the Letter.
Thanks, That's come thing that we did orignally have but got lost in a 
move. I'll be fixing the urls shortly to put them back.
> Instead of the letter:correspondent property being  "Miss%20Hogarth",
> it's more useful if we use a URI to identify the person, that way we
> can describe Miss Hogarth. I think it would be a nice idea to have
> pages for each of the people written to and mentioned in the letters -
> the pages could contain more data about the person, as well as links
> to the letters that mention them. You could also do places and
> concepts.
The correspondents do have a page [1] but again the link has gone 
astray. Will try to fix ASAP as it appears to be in the code. As with 
the letters, perhaps these could do with a uri for different versions, 
such as rdf, xml and so on.
> I've also given the letter an rdf:type of letter:Letter, so that you
> can tell what sort of thing it is.  I notice that the namespace you
> use for the "letter" schema is http://purl.org/letter, which doesn't
> appear to be registered - so I think you should either register it if
> you can (not sure you can have PURL names at the top level?), or maybe
> use http://www.opencorrespondence.org/schema#
I'll look into registering the namespace as part of the current set of 
fixes, changes being made.
> dc:author doesn't exist, it's better to use dcterms:creator, and again
> it's really useful to use a URI to identify the creator, not just a
> name, because then you can have more data about the creator.
That's fixed in the code and will go live in the next update.
> letter:textReferred - the letter I remodelled didn't refer to a text,
> but again, it's good to have a URI to identify each text. I think
> dcterms:subject would be an adequate  property to use instead of
> letter:textReferred, but inventing letter:textReferred is OK too.
One of the things I posed yesterday to Open Literature was regarding 
texts so again is something that is being thought of now to fix up. I'll 
take another look at dc:subject as it might resolve another issue I came 
across playing with the data a couple of days ago.
> I also think it's useful to have the body of the letter in the RDF as
> well, not just the metadata (I think someone made this point before).
> I have used sioc:content, but inventing something like letter:text
> would also be an option.
>
> I've picked out the opener, closer, addressline and textual date, with
> properties I've pretended are in the letters schema. I guess they
> could be useful to index on etc, and would not be too hard to parse
> out of the letter?
I'll add these to the schema. They are not too hard and I've done it in 
a really early version of the letters and is part of the current planned 
rewrite (or at least some of the specific data in them is but I can 
always extend the work to be more inclusive).
> I used dcterms:subject to link to some of the things mentioned in the
> letter, and described some of them (eg, the people and their
> relationships to each other) elsewhere in the RDF.
Places is the next big thing to work on for the project (which falls 
into the opener work) and then people.

Thanks for being pedantic.

Iain

[1] http://www.opencorrespondence.org/letters/correspondent/Miss%20Hogarth