[oslc-core] Fw: [oslc-cm] foaf:Person vs sioc:User for dc:creator or oslc_cm:owner ?

Fri Mar 5 10:12:26 EST 2010

Even though I am no expert on sioc:User or foaf:Person, I do understand 
the two different concepts that Olivier brings up - a resource that 
represents a live person and a resource that represents a user account. In 
my opinion, we need to make use of both those concepts.  I'll use the CM 
Spec example to make my point.

>From the current CM Spec perspective, I would think that the oslc_cm:owner 
property should have values that are live people.  We should not limit 
owners of a Change Request in a CM system to just user accounts in that 
system - it should be allowed to have values that represent live people 
with no user accounts in the system.  On the other hand, the 
oslc_cm:creator should have values that are only user accounts.  Maybe we 
should also consider an additional "submitter" property for the live 
person that is the submitter.  CM systems that support a separate 
"submitter" property that has values that represent live people can have 
completely unrelated values for the "creator" and the "submitter" 
properties. 

Of course, a number of CM tools restrict the owner property values to just 
users with accounts.  That is just a limitation of that CM system, but 
need not be a limitation imposed by the OSLC Spec.  Implementations which 
don't differentiate between the two resources internally can simply 
provide the two representations (user account and person) of the same 
resource.

Having these two different resources may also help in differentiating 
between the role the user account has within the system and the 
"organizational role" that the live person has.  I don't believe that 
we've addressed the concept of "roles" as yet within the Core Spec.  It'll 
be very interesting to see how that is addressed when we need to support 
that in one of the specs.

If there was a way to use sioc:User and foaf:Person to represent these two 
different resources and provide relationships (links) between them, then 
it would flexibly support the different service provider implementations. 

One other thought: the words "User" and "Person" are unfortunately still 
somewhat confusing - it would have been really neat if it was really 
"UserAccount" instead of "User" to really avoid the confusion. 

____________________________________________
Samit Mehta
(512) 323-9350 - Work
mailto:samit.mehta at us.ibm.com
IBM Rational Software - Business Development

oslc-core-bounces at open-services.net wrote on 03/05/2010 07:12:19 AM:

> Thought the core WG should weigh in on this one.   Olivier has a fair 
> amount of experience with this and some good points to consider.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve Speicher | IBM Rational Software | (919) 254-0645
> 
> ----- Forwarded by Steve K Speicher/Raleigh/IBM on 03/05/2010 08:10 AM 
> -----
> 
> From:
> Olivier Berger <olivier.berger at it-sudparis.eu>
> To:
> "oslc-cm at open-services.net" <oslc-cm at open-services.net>
> Date:
> 03/05/2010 05:43 AM
> Subject:
> [oslc-cm] foaf:Person vs sioc:User for dc:creator or oslc_cm:owner ?
> Sent by:
> oslc-cm-bounces at open-services.net
> 
> 
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I've had a look at
> http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/CmResourceDefinitionsV2 and it
> seems that foaf:Person is preferred at the moment for describing
> reporters/owners of CRs.
> 
> I'm not sure this is the best choice, and would propose to use sioc:User
> instead.
> 
> When reading :
> "General agreement on foaf:Person is enough as there are not too many
> systems that have multiple accounts per user. Can be managed by having
> separate person instances (exception, instead of the rule)"
> I'm puzzled...
> 
> sioc:User is already there to manage the situation of several accounts
> (sioc:Users) of the same physical person (foaf:Person).
> 
> Why chose the least suitable one when there's one more flexible ? ;)
> 
> Is this to avoid dependency on sioc and limit to foaf ?
> 
> foaf:Person seems well suited when dealing with real physical persons,
> whereas sioc:User is more about accounts/aliases/nicks of potentially
> anonymous personalities of these real people.
> 
> Also, when thinking about automation, I believe dc:creators couls be
> robots/apps, where sioc:User may be preferred to foaf:Persons too ;)
> 
> In any case, sioc seems more actively maintained than foaf, IMHO, so it
> may be preferred maybe.
> 
> Any comments ?
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> P.S.: I'm in the process of drafting a forge ontology :
> https://forge.projet-coclico.org/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/wp2/index.
> php/Forge_Ontology_Proposal 
> which should be interoperable with OSLC-CM, hence my recent 
investigatiosn 
> of sioc vs foaf.
> -- 
> Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger at it-sudparis.eu>
> http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
> Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
> Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> 
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