Jeni's Musings

What I have found with RDF is that if you don’t fit your modeling in with the standard vocabularies, you are back in the realm of custom semantics: in which case you may as well be using vanilla XML. To put it another way, RDF has a great lack of standardized properties etc and this makes it useless for lots of purposes where you would think it would be easy: there are not enough standard verbs for it to be convenient.

Perhaps your use-case is big enough that you can push through a new set of organization-related verbs for RDF. That would be great.

I had to do a little government-related RDF job recently, my first. I ended up having to make it pretty much like a Topic Map (through the ISO Topic Maps standard has the same problem: not enough ‘Published Subject Indicators’.) The only way I could figure out how to do something useful was 1) to clearly distinguish between concepts and instances and 2) to remember that the job was not modeling information per se but being able to label/enable more semantic understanding of a web of resources.

First I made URLs (URNs actually, I used LSIDs) for all basic concepts (in your case, a ‘School’ and a ‘School name’ and ‘School term’) and labelled them as owl:concepts with RDF triples. Then I made triples for all instances of the concepts (a particular school). Then I could use skos:isSubjectOf to link from the particular instance to web home pages (as well as foaf:page etc for related pages.)

In your case, I would say that perhaps it would be a mistake to treat a webpage for a school at a certain time as if it were a concept. Figure out your concepts, then your instances, then link from these to exiting pages. There is a school concept. There are actual schools. Schools have terms. During school terms they have names. (Or whatever you come up with.) The webpage for a school at a certain time is XXX. At another time it is YYY. (It doesn’t matter if you end up with multiple URLs or URNs for things, you can use owl:sameAs if the same resource has different identifiers.)

In my PRESTO idea, my point was that all significant pieces of information (resources) at every level of granularity should have a unique, persistent, friendly URL regardless of whether each item was on the web or not. I think the Linked Data re-branding of RDF can fit in quite well with this. But some things may be better solved by URL resolvers using regexes (such as the Tuckey resolver) rather than with RDF.

Cheers Rick Jelliffe