[doap-interest] :maintains, :translates, etc.

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at crschmidt.net
Fri Jul 30 03:28:09 BST 2004


Currently, DOAP describes relationships from Projects->People: 
:maintainer, :translator, etc. This is pretty good for project 
descriptions, but useless for describing what I personally do, modelling 
the projects I work on and so on.

I would like to see inverse terms added: :maintains, :translates, etc. 
Rather than having the domain of a project and range of a person, it 
would be done the other way around: the domain is of a person, and the 
range is of a project.

The use of this would be to easily describe, starting from a person, a 
web of projects they are involved in. I :develop LiveJournal, SDLRoads 
and DOAPer. Once this is defined, people can then crawl  either way - 
from person to project or project to person. This would be great to see 
what else other people are working on. I know that I love finding 
projects that friends in the web are working on. 

I know that DOAP is attempting to be small/lightweight, and more 
oriented towards describing projects than the relationships therein, but 
it seems to me that creating these inverses is relatively trivial, as 
well as being pretty useful in terms of creating browsable data.

Basically, this would be a more specific way of listing a 
currentProject, I suppose: a more explicit subclassing of that 
relationship from FOAF. However, I think that it would be a useful 
addition to the schema, for the purpose of finding other projects that 
your friends might be working on.

-- Christopher Schmidt



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