[rdfweb-dev] Re: myers briggs

[Bill Kearney]

> > I've had one in development for a while.
> > http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/schema/mbti/0.1/
>
> Ooh, I'd missed that. Excellent...

You didn't miss it. I hadn't mentioned it yet. ;-)

> I asked Google, and 'Myers' seems to be reasonably dominant.

I'd really like to get something more official than Googling it. Off to a real
library then...

> MBTI makes me think of MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority),
> and more importantly it's unlikely to jog people's memory as they read it,
> whereas either spelling of 'my(e)ers briggs' might evoke a hazy memory of
> that funny personality survey thin

Assuming, of course, we get them over the question "what the heck is Foaf?"
first.

> How about proceeding with foaf:myersBriggs for the 4 letter code, and
> then everything else lives in your namespace; maybe including weightings etc
> too, eventually?

I'm all for being lightweight and consolidated. I'm bothered, however, by the
ever expanding foaf namespace. The overlaps of other efforts like HumanML,
vCard and others start to raise concerns. In this specific case, however, I'm
additionally worried since there's many more personality type identifiers than
just the MBTI. MMPI comes to mind as well. Then there's IQ, SAT, GRE, MCAT and
any number of other "scoring" mechanisms. See my concern? Grafting on one
after another foaf-specific element name seems like a bad idea.

> > <foaf:meta
type="http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/schema/mbti/0.1#">ENTP</foaf:meta>

> This kind of per-statement qualifier isn't something RDF has traditionally
> supported easily.

<sarcasm>
ah yes, the staggeringly wide range of RDF apps that are limited to
'traditional' support
</sarcasm>

> With the most recent draft specs, there is a similar mechanism
> that might be applicable: datatyping. That allows you to associate a
> URI (typically for notions such as Integer, Float, Date etc) with string
values.
> Ultimately I suspect that's the way to go, but for now, while datatyping
> support in tools is at an early stage, I think we need to use more
specifically
> named properties.

Aiiiieee, the xml-dev folks are flogging this mercilessly in their mailing list.

I could see using this as a way to start making it more 'obvious' how RDFS
schemata can be used to indicate this sort of stuff. Programmatically, if you
care, the schema can be consulted to 'walk the hierarchy' of what the element is
based upon. For most apps, however, they're less likely to care. But for the
archiving/mining/indexing sort of applications they'd certainly use it to make
the correlations.

> Regarding the 'kitchen sink' concern, in the glorious semwebby future I
> think I'll be inclined to agree; but for now I'm happy having FOAF be a little
> messy rather than inhibit interesting designs and apps. It is also designed to
> sit alongside much larger 'kitchen sink' vocabs (Wordnet -- 50k nouns; TAP,
> 1000s of concepts) so we don't keep adding things like "Beer", "Airport" etc.

This sort of a 'conservation of namespaces' sort of rule. Good.

> Yes, if we adopted the datatyping syntax (similar to yours except using
> an rdf:datatype attribute). I think we need to wait for parsers and APIs
> to catch up with the specs before using that technique too heavily, though.

Ok, I'll start looking into rdf:datatype and try to use it.

> I've used foaf:dateOfBirth, though don't think its in the schema yet. We
> could derrive starsigns from that.

I saw using Morten's as a clever example of mixing in other namespace elements.
Something searching for stuff issued on a given date would find it. I suppose
this is trying to be a little more conservative about how many levels of schema
association are being made. It'd be dateOfBirth is based on dcterms:issued is
based on dc:date, more or less.

> I'm definitely not an astrology believer
> but don't mind helping folk exchange such info via FOAF. We could do
> foaf:starSign or put everything in a separate schema. Hmm I wonder how many
> similar such things there are? Birthdays, geekcode, starsign, ....
>
> If you fancy writing up a starsign schema I'll add a pointer to that from the
> spec...

Got it in the works already:
http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/schema/astrology/0.1

All the stuff like retrograde, houses, cusps and other stuff is conspicuously
absent. It's just the 12 signs of the zodiac. I don't see this as growing into
anything more that just the signs. But if someone cares to build on this I'm
certainly open to suggestions.

-Bill Kearney