[rdfweb-dev] Re: foaf:accountHomepage reprise

[Dan Brickley]

Something odd is going on with my mail; sorry for having 
missed some of this discussion, and other posts during May.
I saw some, but others have gone into the void. I just 
resusbscribed via mailman as danbri at danbri.org instead of 
danbri at w3.org and can at least send mail now. Haven't figured out 
the problem. 

Anyway, regarding foaf:acountHomepage, some thoughts:

 - I agree with Uldis that FOAF did well through being open to 
  new ideas for vocab, and not being over-conservative. We also 
  have some conventions for allowing experimental stuff into the 
  namespace and marking it as such (ie. 'unstable'). Now SPARQL 
  is here it is also getting easier to exploit such term-stability 
  metadata.

 - I agree that we ought to be using existing vocab if possible.

 - I'm not sure that the concept of 'home page' intuitively applies 
 to each and every hosted page associated with my online accounts.
 But 'homepage' (in the wider Web community) has never been a super 
 precise concept. I think in general, people are felt to have fewer
 homepages than accounts. I have dozens and dozens of accounts.

 - in that light, I'm not sure the xyzHomepage pattern is great,
 since it begs question "home page of what?". Of the account?  Or 
 of the person.

 - these pages are pages created by the service, about the user;
   perhaps we could say that each account foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
   one (or more) of these pages?

 - if we do that, we don't get the account<->page relation to 
 use OWL inverse functional, or functional, concepts. Does that
 matter?

As the wiki notes, 
[[
foaf:accountHomepage could also be safely declared as an
Inverse-Functional-Property (IFP), allowing OnlineAccount resources to
be safely merged together. It's not safe to make accountName an IFP as
the value-space for that property is defined relative to the service its
associated with.
]] -- http://rdfweb.org/topic/OnlineAccountHomepageIssue

This seems a good argument for having an IFP. I'd rather leave the
word "home" out of the property. And I'd rather not (sorry Richard)
conflate accounts with pages, since there are many kinds of account 
which don't (yet) come with Web documents describing them.

How about foaf:accountPage ?

Dan