Express ResourceRelationship in RDF - Darwin Core Hour Input Form 4/9/2018 10:41:53

[iDigBioBot]

A user submitted this information via the Darwin Core Hour webform:
Timestamp: 4/9/2018 10:41:53
Please provide a topic of interest: How can express resourceRelationship in RDF?
Are you capable of and interested in participating: No
Who else would you recommend to participate in the presentation:
What resources can you point to: resourceRelationship
Your name: José Augusto Salim
Your email: joseasalim@usp.br
Your GitHub username: @zedomel

[zedomel]

The DwC RDF guide states that:

The non-RDF use of terms organized under the dwc:ResourceRelationship class depends on values for dwc:resourceID and dwc:relatedResourceID, terms which cannot be used in RDF for reasons discussed in Section 2.6

Looking for solutions I have found that page: tdwg/rdf/ResourceRelationship.md. But it says

Note: the approach suggested in this document is no longer recommended due to concerns expressed by task group members about use of the Open Annotations model in this way

As is not recommend to use OA for express relationship between resources, what am I suppose to use?

[baskaufs]

When we created the RDF Guide, a solution to the problem of the resource relationship terms was not apparent. It was also not clear how often there would be a demand for a solution. So rather than suggest something that was not well thought out, we didn't make a suggestion.

I think that the best course of action would be to get some community discussion about the use cases that need to be satisfied in this circumstance, and then look at possible alternative solutions. In particular, are there multiple users who share the same kinds of relationships that need to be represented? If not, then a consensus may not matter if there aren't multiple data sources to be aggregated.

One reason why creating a mechanism for representing the resource relationship terms in RDF didn't seem critical was because a resource relationship instance itself is really a kind of spreadsheet hack to do what RDF triples do naturally. In other words, if you have subject and object resources and want to indicate that they are linked, just connect them with an RDF predicate and make a triple. That is perhaps an oversimplification of the issue, but there are probably many examples where a resource relationship instance could be replaced by a single triple if an appropriate well-known term were available to use as the predicate. Unfortunately, those sorts of predicates for connecting two URI-identified entities don't (yet) exist in the TDWG world. But if appropriate use-cases were collected from the community, terms to be used for those predicates could be created.

[zedomel]

Thanks @baskaufs for a complete answer.

We will look for uses cases and perhaps new terms could be created within a DwC extension

Reference:
Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web

thanks.