Comments on the Profiles Ontology FPWD from Leslie Sikos

Please find my comments and suggestions to the PROF Ontology below.

The ontology file is syntactically correct. The ontology features a DL expressivity of ALIN(D), so no complex relationships are defined for the concepts of the ontology, and therefore it almost looks like a controlled vocabulary only rather than a fully-featured ontology.

The concept “Profile” has no clear machine-interpretable definition (only a human-readable description), and software agents can interpret nothing more from the ontology file that it is a subclass of dct:Standard.

There are specific ontologies for particular resource types, so the need for defining general resource descriptors has to be justified. When referring to data exchange situations, it has to be specified what exactly can be captured as contextual information.

Relationship with standard and de facto standard vocabularies and ontologies, such as Dublin Core, PROV-O, and SKOS, should be defined (more) clearly in the specification and formally in the ontology file itself. For example, the range of :isTransitiveProfileOf is defined to be dct:Standard—much more similar definitions would be needed.

By reading the specification, the relationship with SHACL remains somewhat unclear, and it is mentioned mainly in the context of implementations only, while the PROF ontology aims at setting constraints as well.

The namespace of PROF, https://www.w3.org/ns/dx/prof/, is a symbolic link only (gives a 404 error in the browser). The best practice is to point the namespace URI to the ontology file itself (for semantic agents), which in this case is https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/WD-dx-prof-20181218/profilesont.ttl, and to a dedicated webpage describing the ontology (for browsers), using content negotiation on the web server; and optionally dedicated webpages created for each term of the ontology with addresses concatenated in the form namespace URI + term + optional trailing slash.

Kind Regards

Leslie Sikos

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2019 01:51:21 UTC