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On 1/24/14, 6:56 AM, Jon Phipps wrote:
>
> Thanks for reminding me that this is an academic panel discussion in front
> of an audience, rather than a conversation.
>

Not entirely clear what you meant by that, but I do think that we have a 
very practical issue in front of us, and it's one of the things that, 
IMO, is holding back the adoption of linked data: the limitations of the 
tools in this area. As I said above, there is no reason why we should be 
working with "raw" URIs in our work, but few tools present the 
human-readable labels to the developer. So we are unfortunately forced 
to work directly with "rdaa:P50209" even though we would prefer to be 
working with "addressee of" (the rdfs:label). Although we shouldn't be 
designing vocabularies to make up for the limitations of the tools, it's 
basically inevitable if we want to get things done. (There are, BTW, 
enterprise-level tools, but they are beyond the $$ of most folks on this 
list.)

I also think that rdfs:label presents us with the same problem that we 
found with SKOS that led to SKOS-XL and "content as text" -- there are 
times when you need to say something more about the label; more than 
what language it is in. It seems quite logical to me that you would have 
one label for experts, another for the general public; one label for 
those doing input, another for your basic UI; one label for children, 
another for adults; etc. You could do that in your application software, 
but then you aren't sharing it. That you found the need for a local 
"reg:name" is evidence of this, but it, too, will prove to be inadequate 
for some needs.

kc

-- 
Karen Coyle
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