Mechanisms for expressing "aboutness" effectively?

Hi folks,

A modeling question for you which, after much hair-pulling, googling, RDF/OWL ontology analysis and reflection, I still can't resolve to my own satisfaction:

What mechanisms have you all found most useful in expressing the concept of "being about" between two things?

A common approach is to provide an instance-specific view, e.g. applying dc:subject, sioc:topic or similar properties to particular concept instances (where those concepts are article, book, blog post, billboard, song, etc.).  However, this doesn't quite give me the modeling flexibility I need as I want to support both declarative and annotative uses with the same construct and without editing/modifying the originals.

Though you might hate it, I'm leaning towards an associative relationship such as 'thing-about' or something like it.  In the past, I've also used untyped occurrences which then effectively morphed into 'thing-occurrence' as in 'in this thing there is an occurrence or mention of some subject', but, again, I'm not entirely happy with this approach either as the former is effectively one or more dc:subject properties.

I want a general mechanism that can be used to apply to topic instances which themselves are about things and to topic instances describing addressable resources which are about a particular topic.  I initially suspected such a general concept would be easy to find, but I must be looking in the wrong places.

My goal here is to support general and iterative classifications over time, so these initial relationships may be superseded or enhanced by more specific domain ontology relationships, and I want to capture an initial, pragmatic and fundamental basis for these.

Any reactions, suggestions or advice including but not limited to hysterical laughter would be most appreciated... ;)

Cheers,

ast
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Andrew S. Townley <[email protected]>
http://atownley.org