This is very wise. I'll add two cents of my own:
1) Many (not all, but many) of the uses of controlled data in systems like RDA will be (better) supported by the use of identifiers in Linked Data.
2) Working on the Web, it's likely that many of the uses of transcription will be better supported by other forms of representation, like digital reproductions of a resource (e.g. scanned images) or even complete access to a (digital) resource.
We ought, I think, to take these factors into account when deciding how to invest time and effort into supporting these two forms of description.
---
A. Soroka
The University of Virginia Library
On Aug 1, 2014, at 12:18 PM, Robert Sanderson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> In my experience, RDF and Linked Data can do both presentation based information (eg here is content to present directly to the user, without semantics eg [1]) and it can do semantic, descriptive information (here is a rich description of the resource, say a book or annotation eg [2]) but both at once is very challenging without simply repeating everything in a for-machines way and a for-humans way as per the current titleStatement, providerStatement, and one assumes authorStatement, subjectStatement, etc.
>
> Here are two radical ideas, for which the boat has probably long since sailed, but I'll throw them out there regardless.
>
> 1. Don't try to mix them up. Have two completely separate descriptions, where one is intended for humans to read, and the other is intended for machines to reason upon and search. A machine will only ever throw a transcribed string through to the user, so make it easy for them to do that by separating the non-semantic information from the semantic information, with links between them.
>
> 2. Mix them up using the appropriate technology: HTML + RDFA. Instead of thinking about triples for everything, instead create the HTML that you want the user to see. Then annotate that HTML with RDFA properties to add the semantics into the record (and really a record now, not a graph). This way there's only one record to maintain that has both, but uses presentation technology for presenting things to users, and semantic technology for enabling machines to understand the information.
>
> Basically -- use the right tools for the job. RDF has a hard time representing transcriptions outside of non-semantic strings because it was never intended to do that. Order in RDF is a complete pain, because a graph is inherently unordered, but there are very real use cases that require order. On the other hand, RDF is fantastic for controlled data as that is precisely its intended usage. We should make the most appropriate use of the tools that we have available to us, rather than treating everything as a nail.
>
> Best,
>
> Rob
>
> [1]. The IIIF Presentation API is focused on this approach of giving information intended for a client to display, while still being useful linked data by referencing existing semantic descriptions and following REST and JSON-LD. http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.0/
> [2]. The Open Annotation work is a rich data model that provides semantics for web annotation, but says almost nothing about presentation. http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/
>
>
>
> --
> Rob Sanderson
> Technology Collaboration Facilitator
> Digital Library Systems and Services
> Stanford, CA 94305
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