SNAP, Certainty, and Relationship Classes

[Scott Vanderbilt]

As I draw closer to actually start to prepare my RDF for RIB, I am wondering how I may express uncertainty. For instance, I have instances of persons who may or may not be aligned with another identifiable person in, say, PIR, or maybe another epigraphic source. Or an RIB person may or may not have a familial relationship with another identifiable person. What ability will the SNAP ontology have for expressing this sort of uncertainty?

Also, while on the topic of relationships, would it be possible to add a couple of more general classes, e.g., snap:DescendantOf and snap:AncestorOf, where the precise degree of relationship cannot be confidently asserted?

Thanks.

- Scott

[Gabriel Bodard]

Thanks for these questions, Scott. Brief replies below:

> As I draw closer to actually start to prepare my RDF for RIB, I am wondering
> how I may express uncertainty. For instance, I have instances of persons who
> may or may not be aligned with another identifiable person in, say, PIR, or
> maybe another epigraphic source. Or an RIB person may or may not have a
> familial relationship with another identifiable person. What ability will
> the SNAP ontology have for expressing this sort of uncertainty?

At the moment we haven't specced a mechanism for encoding uncertainty
in these two kinds of statement. I think it's relatively easy to see
how to incorporate that into our model for relationships, less so for
identifiers. We'll work on this a little more and get back to you
soon.

> Also, while on the topic of relationships, would it be possible to add a
> couple of more general classes, e.g., snap:DescendantOf and snap:AncestorOf,
> where the precise degree of relationship cannot be confidently asserted?

I believe DescendentOf and AncestorOf are in the ontology, they just
weren't in the Cookbook. See the full ontology docs at
<http://snapdrgn.net/ontology>.

Cheers,

Gabby

--
Dr Gabriel BODARD
Researcher in Digital Epigraphy

Digital Humanities
King's College London
Boris Karloff Building
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL

Email: gabriel...@kcl.ac.uk
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http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
http://www.currentepigraphy.org/