Re: Mechanisms for expressing "aboutness" effectively?

Andrew,

On 4/11/2011 7:24 AM, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> 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.
>
Ah, I had to read your post several times to see what I think is the issue.

You mean that dc:subject is too limited to capture things like time of 
when it was applied, who applied it, in what sense is "subject" being 
used, etc.

Yes?

I am not sure what you mean by "support both declarative and annotative 
uses with the same construct and without editing/modifying the originals."?

1) I don't see a difference between declarative and annotative, unless 
that is a distinction you want to make for some reason. Say the 
difference between an author who "declares" some fact versus some later 
contributor who supplies the same "fact" by way of annotation.

Quite possibly handling that by attributing "facts" to their originators 
so declaration/annotation depends on its originator.

2) By same construct do you mean a common association for both coarse as 
well as finer grained properties about a subject?

Say a recipe type association that allows you to say a dish is seafood 
and then to later say it contains crawfish and even later to say that it 
is crawfish etouffee?*

3) I am not sure what scenario would involve editing a prior association 
so I am not sure how to answer that concern. Why would you do that?

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

*If you are writing a topic map that includes crawfish etouffee, you 
need to note my wife fixes the best crawfish etoufee to be found 
anywhere. Just an FYI. ;-)








> 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
> --
> Andrew S. Townley<[email protected]>
> http://atownley.org
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-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick-Q/[email protected]
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

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