Finding Triples, or at least the right triples

I've never been comfortable generating RDF triples. The ideas are so simple they must be tricky has always been my response to RDF. Finding an appropriate set of terms I find hard.

My latest foray into RDF land was to try and capture interesting blog uri's. I've commented on this before, but done nothing about it. I had another try yesterday. With simple statements the subject object relationship triple is straightforwards. :John :loves :Jill. My subjects are uris so that's OK. Or is it? Doubt creeps in. Then I want to talk about tags. As in delicious tags, or technorati tags. I find them a useful indexing mechanism. Some stuff I use two tags, which delicious immediately seperates. I noted some time back that Norm has a hierarchy of tags (on his site) to circumvent this issue. So, I have a uri and a tag. Basically that's it. Until sbp mentioned that dc:description comes nicely into this equation. Tags by themselves are too brief. If I'm tagging a book recommendation I don't want the full ISBN, title and author etc. I want a link to the blog, my tag and a comment.. sorry, description. So that's it. There's my triple. Sean being sbp of course he allows 5 tags which brings out the flexibility! My finished entries look like this.

<http://bashcurescancer.com/the-60-second-getopts-tutorial.html> \
   :topic :bash, :options; \
   dc:title "Bash options" .

Being n3 of course they're all on one line. Except I'm not particularly happy about the 'tags' being locally defined objects. My usage is just as labels. Not really first class objects at all. It is processable though. I can gather all my tag related stuff together. I'm happy enough to go gathering, which is a few hours work.

Thanks Sean.