1 Mar 2009 11:19
[foaf-dev] (static) functional properties for distinguishing people?
Hi foaf-dev, Apart from one's natural date of birth, what other properties do you folk consider to be "functional" (and statically so)? I'm asking with regard to telling when two descriptions are of different people. In RDF/OWL a property is functional if, for some particular thing, there is at most one true value for any specified property. Since RDF and OWL don't take time or context into account, this leaves a grey area around properties such as "age". I don't want to get into that modeling issue right now, but I am interested to look for plausible properties that can be used when comparing people descriptions, so we can say "if these two descriptions are both true, then they must be descriptions of two different people". Historically we have focussed more on the complementary situation: figuring out when two descriptions are about the self-same thing (in FOAF, typically Person). This is useful, but we've neglected the need to distinguish people. If I'm given: a.rdf: <Person><homepage rdf:resource="http://danbri.org"/></Person> b.rdf: <Person><homepage rdf:resource="http://qwertyuip.example.org"/></Person> ... nothing in RDF's logic prevents those from being about two different people. But they might also be descriptions of the same person.(Continue reading)
> There are a few more working examples on the page, beneath the input
> box. It currently uses
>
> foaf:holdsAccount
> foaf:accountProfilePage
Even though I use accountProfilePage in my foaf, and blogged about it,
I realised recently that this is not in the spec (yet?)
On 4 Febuary Simon Reihardt wrote on foaf-dev:
> Anyway, foaf:accountProfilePage seems to be what many people use
> (including Henry Story: [4]). I still disagree with that because in
> my eyes foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf [5] captures exactly what is needed
> here. So if you really have to use yet another property just because
> it's used in a context where foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf hasn't been used
> before (but is perfectly valid for), then go ahead, but at least
> make it a sub-property of foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf. In my eyes it's an
> unnecessary duplication of properties. More re-use! Makes data
> integration easier! 
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