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

Fri Nov 5 14:21:23 UTC 2010

You're absolutely correct re: the addition of historical linked data 
giving substance to the correspondence network. As per the discussions 
that we' ve been having today, I'm more than open to extending 
opencorrespondence and creating more URIs to allow for linked data.

To date, I've been more focussed on completing what we have (with still 
some work to do) than extending it. The source code for Open 
Correspondence in a Mercurial repository at 
http://knowledgeforge.net/letters/hg.

Iain

On 05/11/2010 13:15, Keith Alexander wrote:
> 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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