[open-literature] [foaf-dev] Fwd: [pedantic-web] Open Correspondence RDF

Fri Nov 5 13:15:11 UTC 2010

Just a small amount of historical social network (linked) data could
really enrich a lot of (eg) Bibliographic and correspondence data.

http://charlesdickenspage.com/family_friends.html seems to be a decent
summary of Dicken's social network (Dickens' scholars confirm, or
offer alternatives?) - I'd be interested in helping encode it as RDF
(by hand). Could we mint URIs in the http://opencorrespondence.org/
namespace ? Could http://opencorrespondence.org/ publish it as Linked
Data ?

Keith

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 11:28 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:
> Great stuff re historical social networks. I'd love to see this bridged to
> dbpedia and the work of the linked library data group...
> Dan
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Keith Alexander <k.j.w.alexander at gmail.com>
> Date: 5 November 2010 04:37:04 CET
> To: "print.crimes" <print.crimes at yatterings.com>
> Cc: Open Literature <open-literature at lists.okfn.org>, James Toon
> <james.toon at ed.ac.uk>, pedantic-web at googlegroups.com
> Subject: [pedantic-web] Open Correspondence RDF
> Reply-To: pedantic-web at googlegroups.com
>
> Hi,
>
> I have some suggested improvements for the RDF output of the Open
> Correspondence website[1].
>
> I have sketched out a modelling for one of the letters: http://bit.ly/axvkF2
>
> (I am also CCing the "pedantic web" mailing list, whose members may
> have some constructive feedback, and possibly pick up any mistakes
> I've made)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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#
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 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.
>
> Yours,
>
>
> Keith Alexander (RDF pedant)
>
> [1]  http://www.opencorrespondence.org/data/endpoint/rdf
>
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