Subject: Re: [[meta:wikitopics]] updated
Newsgroups: gmane.org.wikimedia.wikidata
Date: 2012-06-14 09:21:28 GMT (3 years, 25 weeks, 6 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes ago)
John McClure wrote:
"Of course, thanks for the pointer. Yes, I'd agree that 19788's ontology be closely reviewed for
inclusion. 19788:2 standardizes the Dublin Core properties, the same I recommend for [[wikidata]]
provenance data, the same slated for the [[wikidata]] ontology. But more to your point is that the entire
ISO corpus would fit really well if it were viewed as a topic map whose topics and sub-topics can be
referenced from [[wikidata]] artifacts such as property definitions."
Hello John
Frankly speaking I don't see why one would want to use topic maps.
That is RDF triples are after an identification (canonical: elements with the same URI are identified)
a labeled graph, here to be called "the" RDF graph. (I know that some people call the triples themselves
"the" RDF graph, but why use a second word (namely graph) for triples?
Triples are very trivial highly disconnected graph.).
If I want to connect certain nodes of that graph to a topic
I only need to supply these nodes with an extra triple which says
("this node belongs to this topic", i.e. something like (node, belongsto,thistopic) ) or modify
the canonical identification map and the RDF graph will be a "topic map" or one has the case that the triples
are
already set out in "topics" that is for example
if I have a set of triples with the same resource URI then upon canonical identification these are
a kind of "topic map" (with all "legs" pointing in one direction) or am I missing out something crucial?
However if you start with topics, you have no canonical information about the "internal structure" of
a topic and in some cases you would need to artificially impose this in retrospect onto
the datastructure.
Like if your topic is "members of a society" , you have all the members and you would need some internal
structure like a hierarchy
then you would need to supply each member with a hierarchy classification
(i.e. with extra data, which is usually different for each member). For the RDF case the person who gave you
the triples could have made a choice of order which could be given upon canonical identification. I.e. in
principle the
internal structure depends on your identification map but there is a canonical one.
You can of course mimick a RDF triple with a topic map by choosing the topic to be the ressource and
one "leg" of your topic as a property and the topic which is connected with this "leg" as the object, but the
choice of a leg is not canonical if there is more than one leg. Only if you would make all "legs" of a topic map
into triples you would have something like a canonical assignment. I find these differences important.
But may be I have overseen something or misunderstood
about topic maps (I read about this issue what I found scattered around in the internet so this is not so
unprobable).
I had this kind of discussion with people from deepa mehta http://www.deepamehta.de/
because they used topic maps, but sofar nobody there could convince me about the distinguished advantages
of topic maps.
But the discussion was sofar rather brief.
The discussion was because we discussed to what extend it would be possible to merge a student project we
had at HTW Berlin ( a collaboration platform for visualizing RDF data called Mimirix
http://www.daytar.de/art/MIMIRIX/) with deepa mehta, like for example
one could use at least the backend, which has already a layout for access control
(the deepa mehta people told me that they haven't yet really attacked the issue
of access control) or one could use at lease the carefully designed client.
May be you have other arguments for topic maps, as said I might have missed out something.
I understand that there are other issues like the speed of adressability or direct access issues
but these are then rather an issue of the serialization I find.
So I didn't understand why for example the pregiven JSON structure of an JSONarray
http://www.json.org/javadoc/org/json/JSONArray.html
is not used in JSON-LD
http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld-syntax/#sets-and-lists
but thats another topic.
In the context of applications of ISO metadata you may want to read:
http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Examples+of+semantic+web+applications+and+environment