Re: Are we losing out because of grammars?

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Eric van der Vlist wrote:


> "K.Kawaguchi" wrote:
> >
> > You're right. And I read your tutorial that states
> >
> > > The role of TREX is ... not to assist in interpretation of the
> > > documents belonging to the class
> >
> > (1) I think "assistance of the interpretation" is important requirement
> >     of schema language (or at least I think there are solid needs).
> >     But it seems to me that you don't share this view, do you. Why?
>
> Aside from the technical point answered by James, I see a big danger in
> transferring too much of "assistance of the interpretation" from the
> documents themselves to the schema languages.

It should be noted that RDF Schema is explicitly designed to "aid in
interpretation" rather than to constrain syntax.


>
> and use a schema to indicate that {http://example.org/ns/books}:fname
> has the same meaning than {http://example.org/ns/people}:first-name.

something like:

<rdfs:Class rdf:ID="author">
    <rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="person"/>
</rdfs:Class>

and

<rdf:Property ID="fname">
    <rdfs:subPropertyOf rdf:resource="first-name" />
</rdf:Property>

<
> This is both useful -to define equivalencies between vocabularies- and
> very dangerous because the processing of your document becomes dependent
> on a heavyweight process and external documents.
>
> Your document becomes more complex to read even for a human reader since
> to understand what is the meaning of {http://example.org/ns/books}:fname
> he needs to check the schema.

That's IMHO more of an issue of schema design: Why introduce the "fname"
term when "first-name" is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps if we did consult
terminologies we could better re-use existing terms rather than continuously
reinvent the wheel.

This is of course the reason that we provide 'well-known' natures.html and
purposes.html in RDDL, not to prevent anyone from using other terms, but to
enable good citizens to create easily understood documents.

But as in documents designed purely for human consumption, people have a
need to continuously invent new terms for otherwise common things. It is
both a way for members of a group to speak precisely about common knowledge
and as a barrier to entry for outsiders (for example medical terminology :-)

-Jonathan