IRI reuse and synonyms #17
Description
In theory, RDF authors should reuse
existing IRIs, rather than minting their own. But this makes
for messy RDF and increases the up-front burden on developers.
Consider a typical RDF project that integrates data from
multiple sources, and needs to connect that data into its own
vocabulary. The resulting data involves both the normalized
vocabulary and the non-normalized source vocabularies,
intermixed. The developers might be happy to adopt existing
concepts like foaf:name (for a person's name) and dc:title (for
a document title) into the project's normalized vocabulary.
But by using those existing IRIs instead of minting their
own IRIs in their own namespace (such as myapp:name and
myapp:title), it becomes hard to distinguish IRIs of the normalized
vocabulary from IRIs of the non-normalized source vocabularies.
Ideally a project should be able to use its own preferred names
(and namespaces), like myapp:name and myapp:title, while still
tying those names to existing external IRIs, such as foaf:name
and dc:title.
owl:sameAs is not great for this. It is too heavyweight
for simple synonyms, and it is only for OWL individuals --
not classes. Furthermore, it provides no way to indicate
which IRI is locally preferred. It would be good to have a
simple standard way to rename IRIs or define IRI synonyms.