You Aren’t Gonna Need It

We’ve been discussing lately how to merge person records in SNAP, so that when we encounter partner projects that each have a record for the same person, SNAP can provide a useful service by combining those into single, merged records, and we can start to get an idea of the requirements for performing operations like merges on our data. This discussion has proved something of a rabbit hole. Continue reading You Aren’t Gonna Need It

The Old Classes vs Properties Debate (or Relationships Are Hard, Part 2)

One of the decisions that has to be made when creating an ontology is which concepts you encode as classes and which you encode as properties of those classes. One of the difficulties is that there is no overarching ‘right answer’ (although there are wrong ones) to how you should model your domain, in has to be decided on a case-by-case basis of what works best for the type of world view that you are trying to encapsulate within your model. This post is a request for feedback to help us decide which model works best for both the project and the wider community. Continue reading The Old Classes vs Properties Debate (or Relationships Are Hard, Part 2)

Why SNAP IDs?

One question that came up during the workshop a couple of weeks ago was: if partner projects already assign their own URIs/ids to their person/name/etc. records, then why should SNAP assign its own identifiers? There are two answers to that, one very practical, and the other a bit more philosophical.

  1. SNAP IDs will be URIs themselves, and when dereferenced in a browser, or by an application, will return a result. Either a web page listing what SNAP knows about the record in question, or RDF data about it. We can’t do this in a practical way without assigning our own identifiers.
  2. On a more theoretical level, we think that any updates made to data post-ingest shouldn’t be made directly on our partners’ data. We believe, for example, that while SNAP might assert an identity between two person records coming from two partner datasets, it will be up to the partners whether they accept that identification.

Continue reading Why SNAP IDs?