Vocabularies compatible with the Dublin Core

Question

I try to express the notion of creator of a company in Dublin Core. This needs to be different than the DublinCore:creator that created the record.

For example

record:Microsoft creator:Bill Gates creator:John Doe

By the first "creator" I mean the creator of the company, the CEO. By the second "creator" I mean the user that inserted the record into the system.

Not the same "creators", they refer to different things. How do I do this? Is there a vocabulary or concept scheme, compatible with the Dublin Core that I can use? The FOAF is Dublin Core compatible but has nothing similiar to "title" or "job".

Answer 1

You want to say something about two different things: 1. the company itself, 2. the record about the company. Therefore you need two resources.

In RDF, you would represent these resources with URIs. For example, you could reuse DBpedia’s URI that represents the company Microsoft, and an URI under your own control for the record:

@prefix ex: <http://example.org/some-vocabulary/> .

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Microsoft> ex:creator "Bill Gates" .
<http://example.com/records/microsoft> ex:creator "John Doe" .

And then you can, for example, say that the record is about the company:

<http://example.com/records/microsoft> ex:about <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Microsoft> .

Note that it’s important to use the DBpedia URI with /resource/ instead of /page, to which you get redirected. They do this exactly for the same reason: to differentiate between the company and their page about that company.

You can find more details in my related answers:

• httpRange-14 issue; differentiating between author of a book and author of a page about the book
• information resource vs. non-information resource
• URIs for Linked Data; differentiating between events and pages about the events

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You can use any kind of (RDF-based) vocabulary. I don’t think that Dublin Core’s creator property is really suitable for cases where a company is created. Instead, you could use Schema.org’s founder property, for example.