VEP-015: relationship_type#References

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Colleagues,

On Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 05:18:49PM +0100, gilles landais via registry wrote:
> "rdfs:seeAlso" matches exactly with the VizieR use case -  It sounds to be a
> good alternative to the VizieR registry "related-to" links.
>
> So, please, you can close the  VEP "references" and transform it into VEP
> "seeAlso" (unless the use of "References" interest other people).

Ok... I've marked VEP-015 as abandoned; I admit the situation about
#Cites and #References and all that is too complicated for us to
unravel, in particular since the beancounters seem to look at the
concepts, and then the less we have to do with it the better.

However, rdfs:seeAlso is quite certainly not what we want.  True that
both domain and range of it is RDF resources, and basically
everything is a resource in that sense and hence *if* we were
actually doing RDF triples here we could just plug it in and be done
with it.  But it is so general that it's totally unclear what clients
should do with it; and it would be *very* hard to delimit its
extension from what other terms we already have.

As usual, for figuring out sensible meanings it's probably most
helpful if one first has a clear idea of what a client should do with
the proposed concept.  What should happen?  Can you draw a mock-up of
an interface?  How is that interface different from something we can
already do?

I'm saying this because VEP-016's rationale was *very* far from
seeAlso (which is basically "everything"); it described a very special scenario:


    Paper 1  --------------- (Cites) -------------> Paper 2
       |                                               |
       |                                               |
(isSupplementedBy)                              (isSupplementedBy)
       |                                               |
       |                                               |
       v                                               v
  VOResource 1 ------------- (PropX) -----------> VOResource 2

PropX in this graph is what we'd want to define.

Is that really the use case you want to express?  Or is it an example
for "just some old relationship that I don't care to more closely
define"?

If the former, it sounds what you want would be "Citation by Proxy"
or perhaps "Supplements Cited of Supplementee" or so.

If the latter, we can simply create a superconcept of all the
existing terms; perhaps "GenericRelationship".  However, before
committing so something to general that it's questionable whether any
useful information is conveyed, I'd really like to see the, if
you will, user interface to relationships of that sort.

Sorry for being a bit pedantic, but I'm always a bit worried that we
don't spend enough time thinking about what our consumers should do
with all the metadata we give them...

Thanks,

            Markus