(Resending the same message again. I got a reply from the list server that it rejected my mail because I routinely sign my mails and it does not accept digital signature. Strange.)
Kelley,
probably a few words about how named graphs work is helpful. With the caveat that this is still under discussion in the RDF Working Group; I would almost say 'under discussion as we speak' because it is indeed the most discussed issue in the Working Group these days. (There are a number of detailed semantic issues where we will have to find a consensus on and this is not always easy.)
You said:
> At ALA Annual someone made the comment that linked data doesn't support assertions in the form X said that Y is Z. Other people said this wasn't true, but I didn't hear any explanations of how you could do it.
So, just for the records: there is something called reification for this very case in the current version of RDF. Ie, technically, it is possible to write this down with RDF triples, *but to not use it*. Indeed, reification is badly defined, it has semantic bugs in it, ie, will probably be strongly deprecated. I just made this remark in case you run into this somewhere, so that you know what not to use:-)
So let us look at Named Graph. You have the statement 'Y is Z.'. We are on the Web, ie, these triples are somewhere, or can be somewhere. So we can give them a URI, say, <http://ex.org/>. (What *exactly* 'giving them a URI' means is the subject of discussion, so I waive my hands a bit here, see also below.) In a (not-yet-standardized) syntax, I could say:
<http://ex.org/> { Y is Z. }
From that point on, I could use the URI to make further statements on them; after all RDF is all about URI-s:
X said <http://ex.org> .
or
<http://ex.org> is_said_by X ;
on_date "2012-01-09" ;
on_place "Aix-en-Provence, France" ;
etc. For example, if you have a provenance vocabulary (and this is being worked on by the Provenance Working Group) then all kinds of statements can be said about <http://ex.org>, as complex as you want...
This is, essentially, how it works. Again, I have to emphasize that the exact semantic of <http://ex.org> is not yet defined. There may be several versions, actually. One school of thought says that
<http://ex.org/> { Y is Z. }
is just a very loose association of a URI and a set of triples, essentially some form of tagging and nothing else. Others say that what this means is something like "If I use <http://ex.org> in a HTTP GET operation on the Web, I would get back a serialization of the 'Y is Z' triple". Both has its merits, both has its downsides. Personally, I would imagine the compromise will be that both types of 'named graphs' will be definable with a suitable syntax. But I may be wrong in my predictions.
Note that, in this example, usage of the named graph syntax may look like an overkill and some sort of a quads would look more natural:
Y is Z <http://ex.org> .
but, of course,
<http://ex.org> { ...place many triples here... }
is a more realistic use case where this syntax becomes much handier.
Having said all that... I am not sure you need this apparatus for the problem you describe, but that is really where your expertise is better than mine, because you know better what your application domain requires. However, something which says
DVD1 hasPrimaryLanguage [
languageName "English" ;
languageLevel "Primary" ;
... whatever else you want to say here ...
] ;
hasSecondaryLanguage [
languageName "Arabic" ;
translated_by "XYZ" ;
translated_at "2011" ;
] ;
hasSecondaryLanguage [
languageName "French" ;
....
] ;
looks perfectly ok to me, and this can be described by the RDF of today. Note that this is how SKOS handles the various language labels: it has primary and alternate labels for SKOS concepts.
But provenance is a typical example for something that needs the named graph mechanism indeed.
I hope this helps...
Cheers
Ivan
On Jan 9, 2012, at 01:51 , Kelley McGrath wrote:
> Stephen Paul Davis wrote:
> I understand that W3C and others have recognized that the RDF triples approach in fact lacks two important parameters that will need to be defined before we go much further, namely namespace and provenance. So we'll need "quintuples" instead of triples
> **
> Ivan Herman <[log in to unmask]> wrote
> Well, yes and no...
>
> The RDF community and, more specifically, the RDF Working Group, has to come to grip with the notion of named graphs. Simply put, there should be a way to consider a set of triples and identify that set with a URI... Once this is somehow settled, the general framework can be used to attach, eg, provenance information to a graph... So we are not talking about quintuples. You can look at the named graphs as quads (that is the way many system implement them) but that is only an implementation detail for now.
> **
>
> I find this idea of "named graphs" very interesting and would like to understand it better. Apologies in advance for the length of my questions and comments. I hope they make some sense as my understanding of linked data is rudimentary.
>
> At ALA Annual someone made the comment that linked data doesn't support assertions in the form X said that Y is Z. Other people said this wasn't true, but I didn't hear any explanations of how you could do it. I am coming at this from a cataloger's perspective and for a project I am working on there are times when I think I want to say things like this or other things that seem to require more than three data points. I am not sure how much sense this will make, but I thought I'd throw it out there and see if I'm at all on the right track.
>
> I'd like to organize my thoughts around some issues that came up when OLAC was doing our initial investigations into the potential of the FRBR model to improve access to moving images (seehttp://www.olacinc.org/drupal/?q=node/27, particularly part 3a). There we were talking about works, but I'd like to work through an example using language track information on DVDs.
>
> It's easy to see how to construct a statement that says this DVD is usable in English
>
> DVD1 -- hasLanguage -- English
>
> But during our discussions, we realized that we wanted to record several more specific aspects of language information, including whether the language is
>
> Spoken, signed or written
> Within written whether it is captions (open, closed, SDH), subtitles, or intertitles
> The original language or a translation
> Primary or secondary
>
> Primary vs. secondary might seem like an odd thing to want to know, but in practice, you can go wrong if you don't make this distinction. IMDb often fails on this count, which leads to a list of the most popular Thai language films being topped by The Hangover Part II (2011) and Rambo (2008) (see http://www.imdb.com/language/th) and The Godfather (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/) is listed as if it is equally in English, Italian and Latin. You also see this lack of distinction in library bibliographic records, especially for educational/documentary videos with a few subtitled sequences in another language.
>
> So maybe one way to go at this would be to combine all these characteristics into one mega predicate
>
> DVD1 -- hasLanguagePrimaryAudio -- English
>
> And then map that to the less restrictive cases so
>
> hasLanguagePrimaryAudio -- isSubTypeOf -- hasLanguagePrimary
> hasLanguagePrimaryAudio -- isSubTypeOf -- hasLanguageAudio
> hasLanguagePrimary -- isSubTypeOf -- hasLanguage
> hasLanguageAudio -- isSubTypeOf -- hasLanguage
>
> so if someone is just looking at the unrefined language level they can get that. But it does seem like an awful lot of possibilities to account for.
>
> Maybe another way would be to introduce an intermediate entity between the DVD and the language information like this. One advantage is that you could distinguish mixed soundtracks from multiple soundtracks as in statements 1 and 2 in the example below for a DVD with the movie's original mixed Arabic and French soundtrack, a dubbed Spanish soundtrack and an English subtitle track.
>
> DVD1 hasLanguageStatement LanguageStatement1
> LanguageStatement1 -- Language -- Arabic
> LanguageStatement1 -- Language -- French
> LanguageStatement1 -- LanguageLevel -- Primary
> LanguageStatement1 -- LanguageType -- Audio
> LanguageStatement1 -- LanguageOriginal -- Original
> LanguageStatement1 -- InfoSource -- Container
>
> DVD1 hasLanguageStatement LanguageStatement2
> LanguageStatement2 -- Language -- Spanish
> LanguageStatement2 -- LanguageLevel -- Primary
> LanguageStatement2 -- LanguageType -- Audio
> LanguageStatement2 -- LanguageOriginal -- Translation
> LanguageStatement2 -- InfoSource -- Container
>
>
> DVD1 hasLanguageStatement LanguageStatement3
> LanguageStatement3 -- Language -- English
> LanguageStatement3 -- LanguageLevel -- Primary
> LanguageStatement3 -- LanguageType -- Written
> LanguageStatement3 -- LanguageTypeWritten -- Subtitle
> LanguageStatement3 -- LanguageOriginal -- Translation
> LanguageStatement3 -- InfoSource -- Container
>
> And then you would have to give people who want to use this data some way to connect the dots, which I'm not sure how to do.
>
> This approach would also be useful for ordering data. For instance, for film and video, the order in which cast names are presented is important, as well as the type of ordering. In addition, this could allow you to make statements about where the data came from. So you could have something that linked transcribed names with identifiers.
>
> Work1 hasCastCredits CastStatement1
>
> CastStatement1 hasSource Manifestation1 [orhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101531/ which is where I actually took this from or some other reference source or unspecified for legacy data or where someone doesn't want to bother]
> CastStatement1 hasOrder CreditsOrder
>
> CastStatement1 hasCredit CreditStatement1
> CreditStatement1 hasPosition 1
> CreditStatement1 hasTranscribedName "Charlie Sheen"
> CreditStatement1 hasNAR http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n88368094[Sheen, Charlie]
> CreditStatement1 hasFunctionhttp://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/act.html [actor]
> ...
> CastStatement1 hasCredit CreditStatement15
> CreditStatement1 hasPosition 15
> CreditStatement15 hasTranscribedName "Larry Fishburne"
> CreditStatement15 hasNAR http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no93030105[Fishburne, Laurence, 1961-]
> CreditStatement1 hasFunctionhttp://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/act.html [actor]
>
> Of course this is a lot of nesting and you'd have to make it work for data consumers who didn't want all that complexity.
>
> How would you approach these kinds of problems with a named graph? Or is this not something where you'd want a named graph? Is it better not to do all this in linked data but rather some format for internal consumption and just use the linked data for the simplified data that external users are likely to want? Am I hopelessly on the wrong track?
>
> Kelley
>
>
> Kelley McGrath
> University of Oregon
> [log in to unmask]
----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf
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