[rdfweb-dev] OnlineAccount proposal

[Dan Brickley]

* Morten Frederiksen <mof-rdf at mfd-consult.dk> [2003-07-26 19:43+0200]
> On Saturday 26 July 2003 18:07, Dan Brickley wrote:
> > <foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="p1">
> >  <foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
> > </foaf:Person>
> >
> > <foaf:OnlineAccount>
> >   <foaf:accountUser rdf:nodeID="p1"/>
> >   <foaf:accountType>Chat</foaf:accountType>
> >   <foaf:accountServiceHomepage rdf:resource="http://chat.msn.com/"/>
> >   <foaf:accountName>danbri_2002</foaf:accountName>
> > </foaf:OnlineAccount>
> I like this approach, but would encourage the use of classes instead of a 
> literal for account types, possibly subclassed off the genereal OnlineAccount 
> class. This would also make it easier to make statements about account types.

Agree re classes, I was being a lazy typist (and it reads better).
Account types will probably form complex hierarchies, and we may want to
use OWL to help us reason about them to avoid confusion / error. Using
classes would allow people to further subclass them, eg. we could define 
foaf:OnlineGamingAccount and someone else could define
gamerz:Online3DGamingAccount as a sub-class.

To flesh out the proposal, which I'm leaning towards inclusion as
'unstable' so we have a stable target to beat up on...

(i) foaf:accountUser has a domain of foaf:OnlineAccount, range of foaf:Agent
(ii) foaf:accountType becomes just rdf:type
(iii) we could write it as a separate rdf:type assertion, to make it
easier to process/parse without schema-based processing
(iv) foaf:accountServiceHomepage has domain of OnlineAccount, range of
Document, and points to the foaf:homepage of the foaf:Organization
responsible for the service that supports the OnlineAccount.
The foaf:accountName has domain of OnlineAccount, is
owl:FunctionalProperty, and takes an rdfs:Literal value.

Let's not talk about passwords and authentication _just_ yet :)

How's that sound?

Dan