[Design] family entries

[James Tauber]

On Sun, 20 Oct 2002 22:56:20 -0400, "Tim Randolph" <tr2002@jrtr.org>
said:
> A thought about families of entries in address books...
[...]
> Is this doable?  It complicates both UI and data structures, but would 
> have some nice payoffs.

I think it's doable and I *certainly* think desirable.

I also think it's an example of the more general use case of the ability
to create arbitrary groups.

In RDF, this is as simple as defining a class (let's call it "Group") and
a property (let's call it "memberOf") with a domain of any Resource and a
range of "Group".

The we can create a Group called "Smith Family" and say, for each member
X of the family that (X, "memberOf", "Smith Family").

There's nothing to stop a person having more than one "memberOf" property
so individual can be in as many groups as the user desires.

A related use case is the ability to associate meetings, emails,
documents, links, people, etc with projects.

In RDF (this is just an example), define a class "Project" and a property
"relatesTo" that has a domain of any Resource and a range of "Project".

Then any resource can be associated with a project. Resources can be in
more than one project but you can get a project view of all the resources
that are related to a particular project.

Add a "subProjectOf" property with a domain and range of "Property" and
you can start to group sub-projects into bigger projects.


James
-- 
  James Tauber
  http://jtauber.com/