Hola,
On 15/03/07, Tom Heath tom.heath@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#ob... ! 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#ob.... 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.