An address book ontology (take 2)http://norman.walsh.name/2005/11/30/contacts81542005-11-30T10:13:27-05:00$Date: 2007-02-20 17:01:06 -0500 (Tue, 20 Feb 2007) $NormanWalsh2005Norman WalshMore thoughts on modelling names and addresses.http://norman.walsh.name/2005/11/25/contactsIn proper Lazyweb
fashion, posting about a topic invariably leads to new information
about the topic. In this particular case:DavidPowell pointed me to the
AddressVocab,
a vocabulary for postal addresses derived directly from a draft
UPUUniversal Postal Union
specification.It's a bit tricker to generate this model from the raw address book
data, but not impossible. Does the benefit of using a more standard vocabulary
outweigh the cost (in terms of complexity) of using it? Time will tell.
The BIO vocabulary
looks like a more standard way to deal with birthdays. And it will naturally
handle anniversaries and deaths, too.And with another few days of experience under my belt, I think
Rich's
suggestion
to avoid all the subproperty names is worth pursuing. Instead of making classes
for all the different kinds of phone numbers and email addresses, I'm simply
assigning labels to them. They are, after all, just labels in my address book
(I don't actually know if your “Work” phone number is or
isn't a mobile phone, for example.)That reduces the size of my ontology considerably:# -*- N3 -*-
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix xs: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix c: <http://nwalsh.com/rdf/contacts#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
# What about bio: http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/
# Or contacts: http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/contact
<http://nwalsh.com/rdf/contacts> a owl:Ontology;
rdfs:comment "Norm's ontology for his address book." .
# ------------------------------------------------------------
# A contact in an address book
c:Contact a owl:Class;
rdfs:subClassOf
[
a owl:Restriction;
owl:cardinality "1"^^xs:nonNegativeInteger;
owl:onProperty c:lastModified ] .
# Timestamp of address book entry
c:lastModified a owl:DatatypeProperty;
rdfs:domain c:Contact;
rdfs:range xs:dateTime .
# Category in address book
c:category a owl:DatatypeProperty;
rdfs:domain c:Contact .
# A middle name (other name properties come from FOAF)
c:middleName a owl:DatatypeProperty .
# Company and title
c:associatedName a owl:DatatypeProperty .
c:associatedTitle a owl:DatatypeProperty .
# Labels
c:label a owl:DatatypeProperty .
# Notes
c:notes a owl:DatatypeProperty .Time, as I said, will tell if these are good choices.