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[higgins-dev] Revised Higgins data model goals

I am working on yet another data model proposal based on RDF. While I've
been working on it, I've compiled a revised set of data model goals. Some
are goals that I think we'd all agree on but were never explicitly stated.
And admittedly some only make sense when viewed from the lens of RDF. The
new goals are here: http://spwiki.editme.com/RevisedDataModelGoalsM4 

A few words about RDF...RDF offers a simple, proven, rigorous, standardized
framework to describe the *semantics* of data in any context to enable
interoperability. It allows object classes to be described in RDF Schema
descriptions (or even more powerful ontology description languages) instead
of in the core data model itself. Context provider implementers are free to
choose whatever internal data classes, structures, relational tables, etc.
that they prefer, as long as they understand the mapping from it to RDF and
RDF-Schema. My hope is that RDF will allow us to agree on a simple data
model as a foundation and then move up a level to work on common
schemas/classes/etc. 

-Paul

PS: Here is RDF primer in half a page:

RDF is extremely simple. In the core data model there are only three
fundamental primitives: 

  Resources - a thing (identified by a URI) 
  Properties - Resources have Properties (identified by a URI)
  Values - Properties have values. The values can be literals or Resources

Data is described in RDF by using a set of statements (called triples). Each
statement has three parts:

  Subject - the resource
  Predicate - the property of the resource
  Object - the value of the predicate of the resource

Here are a couple of examples of RDF triples (liberties taken to prettify
URIs of the resources: Paul, Jim, and B-Movies):

  {Paul, eyeColor, "green"}
  {Paul, interestedIn, B-Movies}
  {Paul, knows, Jim}
  {Jim, interestedIn, B-Movies}

Layered over RDF is RDF-Schema that adds the notion of what in UML would be
called a class.


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