Ayers, How to Describe Composite Products?
Danny Ayers sent some mail to the semantic web mailing list yesterday: How to Describe Composite Products?
I’ve recently been doing a little electric guitar modding, and I’m wondering how best to describe the (material) results in RDF. It’s quite rich information conceptually, you need to talk about relationships involving instruments and their parts in general as well as individual instruments and their individual parts. Because of these different facets, I believe rather more than direct use of RDFS’s class hierarchies is needed, SKOS maybe augmented with a bit of OWL seems a likely candidate.
A fairly generic application of what I’m after would be to describe a (composite) product in a company catalogue, while also allowing their repair department to talk about a particular customer’s broken product and its parts.
Does anyone know of any work in this area?
The only vocabulary shaped like this of which I’m aware is that of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) [1], which makes distinctions between Works, Manifestations, Items and Expressions. But I’m really not sure how reusable this is in the domain I have in mind as the target objects in FRBR are a little more abstract (artistic works rather than engineered planks).
“Engineered planks” do represent a bit of a challenge for FRBR.
(Thanks to Ed Summers for the pointer.)