[OGDev] What are people working on?

[Earle Martin]

Hola,

On 15/03/07, Tom Heath <tom.heath at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the things that confuses this issue IMO is the Guides use of
> hash URIs, i.e. tagging  #obj on to the end of the URI of a page about
> something, to make a URI of the thing itself. It's not a particularly
> pretty/ideal pattern to follow in an RDF world.

That was a very conscious decision on my part following the discussion
on the "httpRange-14" issue within the W3C, which I'm sure you're
familiar with. For those who aren't, the conclusion (which I believe
postdated our implementation) can be found at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Jun/0042.html . It can
be summarised as "if your server responds with a 200 range code to a
URI, it's an information resource; but anything within that resource
with a fragment identifier is not". Our current behavior is in
accordance with this, and I don't wish to change it. Why do you think
it's not ideal?

Incidentally, "obj" itself was something I made up after failing to
find a better alternative to the word "thing", which I have a strong
dislike for. I'm happy for better suggestions.

> Obviously it's grown up organically and we're dependent on many other modules,

Sorry? I don't follow... The RDF is completely independent of
anything; it was hand-composed. Unless you're referring to schemata
(yay Greek!) that we rely on as modules, rather than Perl modules?

> ideally we'd use a URI pattern that went something like:
> http://wherever.openguides.org/thing-name-locale/
> to identify things in the guide, with pages of information about the
> things being at
> http://wherever.openguides.org/thing-name-locale/about

Ideally for human readers? It's all much of a muchness to the
robots... as long as the fragment identifiers are kept, I'm happy,
though.

> Replace the /html you'll likely get in the URL with /rdf for an RDF version. I'm
> guessing this isn't really very feasible for the OpenGuides right now,
> although liberal use of Apache Rewrite rules might get us a lot of the
> way.

A couple of years back I experimented with a pure-Perl method of doing
better URLs (no rewrites required), which ended up with something like
that. Nothing ever came of it, but I wouldn't mind resuscitating the
idea.

> First off, one thing that would help would be to make a link between
> the <uriofpageaboutathing> and the <uriofthingitself>. This is lacking
> at the moment as far as I can tell, hence the lack of links from
> <http://tinyurl.com/ynwxze> to <http://tinyurl.com/28pt4k>. The
> foaf:primaryTopic property should be sufficient for this.

Good call. I could have sworn we did this already, but obviously not.
It's a trivial change.

> The next job is to fix some links in the RDF describing the thing. For example,
> <http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?id=Angel%2C_SE16_4NB;format=rdf#obj>
> is apparently foaf:based_near
> <http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?id=Angel%2C_SE16_4NB;format=rdf#Rotherhithe>
> Now, this may not be incorrect, but there is very little info about
> Rotherhithe at that URI. Instead we should be saying ...
> foaf:based_near
> <http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?id=Locale_Rotherhithe;format=rdf>

(I think you mean
http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?id=Locale_Rotherhithe;format=rdf#obj
! Since it's not based near an RDF document.) But you could say that;
alternatively, the wn:Neighborhood item "Rotherhithe" could be given
an rdfs:isDefinedBy
rdf:resource="http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?id=Locale_Rotherhithe;format=rdf#obj">.
Your version is more compact, but doesn't specify that Rotherhithe is
a wn:Neighborhood, which is an explicit definition that I quite like.

> That RDF file should then ideally contain lat/lon data about
> Rotherhithe, and links to all the things located in that locale.

Sounds good.

> The same issue affects "bob"; rather than just linking to
> <somenodename;format=rdf#bob>, it would be great to identify Bob with
> a URI, <http://wherever.openguides.org/contributors/bob/> perhaps;

See above; it would have to be something more like
http://wherever.openguides.org/contributors#bob , or, if we ever get
formal logins, http://wherever.openguides.org/profile/bob#who ("who"
being the equivalent of "obj" in this case, or again, whatever better
name we can invent).

> After that, we could get on to making links to the Categories that a
> thing is within, using the "find all things within x metres of this"
> to create some nice rdfs:seeAlso links (or even better, more
> foaf:based_near links), and things like that.

Yep.

> [interesting ideas about Revyu skipped...]
>
> Integration of the OpenGuides with GeoNames would also be a very cool
> and very easy win.... The GeoNames guys are
> very approachable, so there could be good opportunities for hookups
> with the OpenGuides in general.

Definitely worth us investigating.

> OK, this emails mammoth, so I'll stop now.

Thanks for the input!

> PS. If anyone else on this list is really into this stuff, then the
> Linking Open Data project
> <http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData>
> is doing some cool stuff in this space. OpenGuides is already listed
> under datasets.

I know you saw http://dev.openguides.org/wiki/RDF%20Workshop before,
but there's a little bit of stuff I dumped on it towards the end
relatively recently that may be of interest. The above link would be
worth adding.

Best,

Earle.


-- 
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/