On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 01:46:31 -0500, Paul Winkler wrote: > On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 06:42:47PM +0000, Steve Harris wrote: > > > Splitting and joining classes? You lost me there. > > > Refactoring? > > > > Yeah, I guess. Eg. if you had Green Things and Red Things and you wanted > > to replace them with Coloured Things. > > How is this done in the RDF world? You create a mapping schema which says GreenThings rdfs:subClassOf ColouredThings . RedThings rdfs:subClassOf ColouredThings . (and the same for the properties that need translating. So any queries you have on GreenThings will be satisfied by instances of ColouredThings - not a perfect match as you can see, but better than nothing. A better example is if someone gives you a load of data in Dublin Core you can say dc:title rdfs:subPropertyOf my:name . dc:identifier rdfs:subPropertyOf my:url . ... So you will get eqivalents in your schema for all the DC properties. If you reverse it as well you will get mapping in both directions so people who use DC can understand your data. > sorry to be a pest, it's just new concepts to me and I'm slow > to grasp the benefits. Not at all, its a bit of an odd concept to get your head round. Someone desciribed ontologies (things like RDFS) as an equivalent of an API for data - which is close enough. - Steve
