Forum Moderators: phranque
I am still getting to grips with RDF (and staying awake through many of the very dry documents ;) ), however I have come up against what is either a lack of understanding on my part, or a TBA section in RDF.
Concerning vocabularies, I quite simply want a vocabulary to define computer resources ( specifically LDAP et al ). Now with my current understanding the whole power of RDF is the relational aspect of the metadata contained within a resource, so it makes sense to a)use existing vocabs or b)extend current ones.
I am I have to say very surprised that there appear to be no existing vocabs for LDAP, DHCP, standard file systems, or indeed generic computer terms (the processor of type Pentium IV at IP address 127.0.0.1 with a value of '1.2Ghz' would appear to me to be a perfectly valid RDF use) etc etc.
For example the 'Person' entity in LDAP. Just describes a person resource with various LDAP properties and values (Subject/Predicate/Object). Whilst it could be 'jimmied' in to fit the Dublin Core 'Creator', 'Contributor', or 'Publisher', it doesn't really fit. So what to do, stick with a poor fit by extending the DC elements, define my own, or see if there is a person element defined by some Computer Studies Department in some University in down town Bogota I've never heard of, and may not be there next week.
Of course if I'm extending a DC element, it would be useful to know if someone has already extended it to create a person sub-element, so I can use that too ( with the above caveat ). But of course, as this is unofficial, and unsupported, there may be a competing element, that might in the future become supported or indeed more popular, which now makes my current one useless for metadata exchange.
So what do I do, the obvious solution is not to depend on DC or my University in Bogota, and hope that someone in the future writes a middleware app that'll transpose data in my 'Person' to someone elses 'Person' so we might actually have a chance at metadata exchange. I can see XML middleware apps being big buisness in the future ;)
Consider a web server, now describe it with existing metadata elements (a perfectly resonable resource to consider RDFing, after all its all available over the net!).
Am I missing something here?
Cheers,
asp
Are you aware of FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)?
Take a look at: [rdfweb.org...]
With RDF, you can use elements from different namespaces in a vocabulary. So, what you want might include Dublin Core and FOAF elements, plus add some new elements.
A good tutorial on RDF and FOAF, "Parsing FOAF with PHP" is online at: [semanticplanet.com...]
Semantic Planet is a good resource in general, and you might ask your question of Ian Davis, who runs that site.
Also, it might be possible to do what you want within FOAF or RSS 1.0, two major RDF vocabularies in common usage. Can you post some samples here, like: resource, property, value?
