Re: ISSUE-18: What are the target entities we want relate people to? [People]

Are you sure this is in scope, Michael? You can describe a person in two 
distinct ways:

- as the individual human being;
- as an identity.

Individual people have properties that stick with them irrespective of 
their current activity or location.

Identities change through time, space and context. One can imagine all 
manner of relationships:

worksFor
marriedTo
owns
partOwns
onceBakedACakeFor

each one adds to the identity of the person but is very 
context-specific. In our context, the organisation ontology already has 
properties for which foaf:agent is the range and I suggest that this is 
the right approach. Imagine that one day we are tasked with creating a 
vocabulary for housing. For that we might define things like:

hasMortgageOn
ownsOutright
rents
landlord
squats

etc. i.e. these all relate something to one or more people and any other 
domain of interest would have a different set. A cover-all set might be 
so generic as to be meaningless (knows, is related to, owns, is 
responsible for?)

To my mind we shouldn't try and do this but just focus on the 
individual, context-free terms and not the relationships.

It is arguable whether a person's address is something that helps 
describe the individual or their identity - I'm open to persuasion 
either way but it's one reason why the ISA Programme has a task force on 
location/address as well as Person.

Phil.



On 28/01/2012 10:26, Government Linked Data Working Group Issue Tracker 
wrote:
>
> ISSUE-18: What are the target entities we want relate people to? [People]
>
> http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/track/issues/18
>
> Raised by: Michael Hausenblas
> On product: People
>
> We need to define the entities we want to relate people to, such as to other people via FOAF, online posts using SIOC, etc.
>
>
>
>


-- 


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Friday, 3 February 2012 17:30:50 UTC