Major change to a SIOC term: User is now called UserAccount
John Breslin
As per recent discussions on the SIOC developers mailing list and
requests from many parties requesting clarification of the term
sioc:User (which has oft been confused with foaf:Person), we are happy
to announce that the new term sioc:UserAccount has been added to the
ontology in replacement of the now-deprecated sioc:User term (in
revision 1.35 of the SIOC ontology).
The SIOC specification has been updated accordingly, and knock-on
effects to SIOC modules have been corrected.
*We would ask all application maintainers to update your code to
reflect this change, i.e., replace User with the new term
UserAccount.*
We have updated the various figures showing the connections internally
between SIOC terms, and also between SIOC, FOAF and SKOS.
http://sioc-project.org/node/341
Please discuss this change on this thread.
Thanks!
Sergio Fernández
as we already discussed here, I totally agree with this change. I'll try
to upgrade my software tools asap.
But looking at the new revision of the SIOC vocabulary [1], I missed
something more in order to support the tools during this transition
period. As section 7.4.5 of the OWL specification [2] says the
deprecated term could be more descriptive, saying something like:
sioc:User a owl:DeprecatedClass ;
rdfs:label "User"@en ;
rdfs:comment "sioc:UserAccount is now preferred"@en ;
owl:equivalentClass sioc:UserAccount ;
(...) .
John, if everybody agrees, can you please add these statements?
Kind regards,
[1] http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#Deprecation
--
Sergio Fernández
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Dan Brickley
> Hi,
>
> as we already discussed here, I totally agree with this change. I'll try
> to upgrade my software tools asap.
Glad to see this change. And while folk are upgrading software, can I
remind also that it would be great to see code changed to consume
foaf:account as an eventual replacement for foaf:holdsAccount? For
now, ideally please support both during the transition, but the hope
is we can have everyone eventually publishing and consuming using the
simpler foaf:account property.
cheers,
Dan
John Breslin
<owl:DeprecatedClass rdf:about="http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#User">
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en">User</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">UserAccount is now preferred. This is a
deprecated class for a User in an online community site.</
rdfs:comment>
<owl:equivalentClass rdf:resource="http://rdfs.org/sioc/
ns#UserAccount"/>
.
.
.
On Mar 25, 10:10 am, John Breslin <john.bres...@nuigalway.ie> wrote:
> Fromhttp://sioc-project.org/node/341
> between SIOC terms, and also between SIOC, FOAF and SKOS.http://sioc-project.org/node/341
John Breslin
deprecated classes / properties in case people are looking for an old
term in a spec and wonder where it's gone...
Sergio Fernández
> Glad to see this change. And while folk are upgrading software, can I
> remind also that it would be great to see code changed to consume
> foaf:account as an eventual replacement for foaf:holdsAccount? For
> now, ideally please support both during the transition, but the hope
> is we can have everyone eventually publishing and consuming using the
> simpler foaf:account property.
That remembers me that I need to make the transition to that property...
Joining both changes, I plan to do the transition in my apps with a
graph pattern supporting all of those (old and new) terms. In SPARQL
it'd be something like:
SELECT ?person ?user
WHERE {
?person a foaf:Person
{
{ ?person foaf:account ?user }
UNION
{ ?person foaf:holdsAccount ?user }
UNION
{ ?user sioc:account_of ?person }
}
{
{ ?user a sioc:UserAccount }
UNION
{ ?user a sioc:User }
UNION
{ ?user a foaf:OnlineAccount }
}
}
Obviously such query is less efficient than supporting only the current
terms, but I guess it's the only way under the RDF Simple Entailment to
assure the compatibility of data and apps during this transition.
Cheers,
Charlie
Begin forwarded message:From: Michael F Uschold <usc...@gmail.com>
Date: 31 March 2010 18:06:11 GMT+01:00
To: Simon Reinhardt <simon.r...@koeln.de>
Cc: "Breslin, John" <john.b...@nuigalway.ie>, semant...@w3.org, deri....@lists.deri.org, publi...@w3.org, seman...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: FW: Major change to a SIOC term: User is now called UserAccount--I am not motivated by philosophical issues.It depends on how you want to use something. Conflating people and roles and accounts may not matter in a localized situation. It seems more likely to sting you in a worldwide context of using linked data. It is limiting in the way you suggest at the end of the message. Making distinctions cleanly (which by accident may please a philosopher), makes it easier and cheaper for a system to evolve and grow.I know second hand of cases where silly mistakes like conflating role with account cost $millions. Why? The system could not evolve to the future needs.The fact that SIOC:User was always a subclass of foaf:OnlineAccount is probably a good thing.I have not carefully studied SIOC, so will not otherwise comment on it.MichaelOn Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Simon Reinhardt <simon.r...@koeln.de> wrote:
Hello MichaelI don't see a problem here. An account is just an entity of managing things, a sort of proxy through which actions like creations are seen. This works perfectly fine in the computer world, maybe not so much if you get more conceptual/philosophical. But I don't see a need to do that. You don't always know the person behind an account and it might even be shared by multiple persons.
Michael F Uschold wrote:
This has a knockon effect, which could create new confusion.
Now the creator of a message is a UserAccount. But this is not sensible. Accounts do not create messages, User's create messages. A User has a relationship with an account, e.g. AccountHolder.
There may be confusion between DC-Creator whose domain presumably does not include Accounts.
Also note that this was a change in naming to clarify the intended meaning of the term. sioc:User has always been a sub-class of foaf:OnlineAccount and thus the meaning wasn't changed. It is sort of one of the basic assumptions of the SIOC model that it's perfectly ok for accounts to work as placeholders for actions and properties within community platforms. This is how those platforms are modelled anyway so they can be nicely described with SIOC rather than having to introduce extra indirection just for some philosophical reasons.
Another way to look at this is to see accounts as roles you can take on which are detached from your person. Or a bit more practical: imagine you have multiple accounts on a platform (one for acting as a user, one for administrating). Isn't it rather important under which account you did something?
In online games people sometimes create multiple accounts to gain advantages - how would you describe that you transferred game money from one of your accounts to another?
Or how would you model that various people use one administrator account? Who "created" that new user account? Surely whoever was logged in as the administrator at that point in time. But even if you knew who it was - if you attached that information to the person you loose information about which account was responsible for it.
I wouldn't necessarily say that dcterms:creator excludes that scenario. Its range is defined as dcterms:Agent which has the following definition:
Definition: A resource that acts or has the power to act.
Comment: Examples of Agent include person, organization, and software agent.
Regards,
Simon
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