internetarchive/openlibrary — pull request #136 by bencomp (2012-01-30 22:56:13+00:00)
Title: RDF changes: consistent URIs without trailing "/", more FOAF, rdf:about=""

Following my ideas about improving the OL RDF output expressed on the tech list, I propose the changes in this request, in combination with the ones in issue #130. They affect the templates for the RDF views of Author, Work and Edition.

All URI references (i.e. URIs that refer to a Work, Author or Edition) are now consistent across the RDF views. They do not have trailing slashes. Talis's OL dataset also use these 'slash-less' URIs.
For readability I removed a couple of assignments like

$ auID = $a.key

and changed the references to $auID to the expressions on the right-hand side of the assignments.

Since not all authors in Open Library are people (I found authors that are museums, e.g. http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1634883A), the Author RDF was made to describe a foaf:Agent instead of foaf:Person.
The Work and Edition records contain foaf:name instead of rdf:value to link the author's name to the author resource. RDF does not assign a special meaning to rdf:value (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/#rdfvalue), so foaf:name makes more sense.

The last change concerns the administrative metadata (the dc:created, dc:modified and ov:versionnumber properties, that describe the record instead of the work/edition/author): I changed the URI from e.g. "http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1634883A/about/" to "", meaning 'this document'. While the meaning changes too, there now is a link between the (RDF) description and resource that is described where there wasn't one before (nothing linked the URI "http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1634883A/about/" to "http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1634883A" or a 'bibliographic record' class). The Edition RDF previously had no separate administrative metadata section, as if dc:modified was a property of the edition itself.