add properties for an agent's personal pronouns

[VirginiaBalseiro]

Adds properties for personal pronouns based on discussion on #79.

After these are added, SolidOS and PodBrowser will have to update their usage of preferred pronouns to these.

[csarven]

• What specs need these terms?
• Are there (multiple) independent implementations using these terms or committing to use?
• Are these terms published in the wild (by different implementations)?
• Are these terms considered stable?
• ...

https://github.com/solid/specification/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#vocabulary-management

[TallTed]

@csarven -- I think your #81 (review) (and any followup to it) would be more appropriate on issue #79 than on this PR which is meant to apply the result of the discussion on that issue. Perhaps it would have been better if the issue had been created before TimBL added personal pronouns to the Solid ecosphere, which I saw when it happened, and which I was happy at the time to see allowed for each agent to enter their own pronouns, rather than forcing selection from preset lists. I am sad that I overlooked the preferred portion of the addition then.

[kjetilk]

Hmmm, unless I'm mistaken, @timbl didn't add it to the solid: namespace there, right?

The solid: namespace is rather concerned with the mechanics of Solid, and not the things that users may want to say about stuff... So, I'm all for having properties for it, but it doesn't seem to belong here. Does that make sense?

[TallTed]

@kjetilk — Depends on how you define "add it to the solid: namespace".

See lines 29–36 of src/profile/profileFormText.ttl which were added in 77ed0ec959f71f39a5e81e4df72b524f954d6c34, which @timbl committed on Apr 3, 2021, thereby, to my mind, indirectly adding them to solid:.

I can't quickly tell whether these terms were used or defined anywhere prior to his commit there, which presaged the term definitions that are trying to be added to solid: by this PR #81 fixing issue #79.

I did find a few other uses of these terms on GitHub. Click to your heart's content!

I have no personal investment in whether solid: is the right namespace for these. If there's a better ontology/vocab/namespace for them, I see no reason why they couldn't be added there, and PRs issued to adjust the instances we know of to match....

[kjetilk]

See lines 29–36 of src/profile/profileFormText.ttl which were added in 77ed0ec959f71f39a5e81e4df72b524f954d6c34, which @timbl committed on Apr 3, 2021, thereby, to my mind, indirectly adding them to solid:.

Ah, you're right! I saw only the terms added to :, which is just then to that very document... But now I see solid:preferredSubjectPronoun too indeed. Hmmm. Arguably, solid:Role falls into the same class, i.e. stuff that is certainly important and useful but not concerned with the technical operations of Solid. My preference would be to have that in a different vocab, one that is managed with a process to add such things, such as schema.org.

But I won't stand in the way if there is rough consensus that it belongs here, but then I don't quite understand where we want this vocab to go.

[TallTed]

I don't (yet) have a horse in the race, regarding whether solid: should be used for things like subjectPronoun ... but lacking expansion and/or repair of the FOAF, Person, and Schema.org (and other) ontologies — which currently do terrible things by blurring lines between the biological and/or genetic attributes of sex, the sociological and/or personal identification attributes of gender, and related terms — solid: may be the best place for these, as we can at least try to do better than the others have to date.

(Currently recognized as part of these pictures are the chromosomal attributes which govern biological expression of physical "sex", the identificational attributes described by which "gender" a person identifies as, the presentational attributes describing the "gender" as which the person presents outwardly, the attractional attributes describing which outward presentations the person finds attractive ... and others. This is still an evolving field, so no-one can really offer a comprehensive list, and we should be prepared to adjust and/or expand the attributes used as necessary. The three pronouns currently in play as relevant to personalizing UI/UX, both when presenting that UI/UX to the person described and when presenting that UI/UX to persons interacting with someone else's POD/storage/data.)

[woutermont]

A great thing about Linked Data is of course that there is no need to add terms to an existing vocabulary. If pronouns are missing from the landscape, why not publish a micro-vocabulary specifically for that purpose?

(Vocabularies, just like software packages, are at their best when they are just as small as their specialized purpose allows. Any bigger makes them harder to use and maintain. I see no reason why anyone wanting to use pronouns in RDF should have to use the namespace of a completely unrelated project (being Solid).)