Re: SKOS and OWL

Carl Mattocks schrieb:

> I do not agree with your statement that 'mixing OWL and SKOS is wrong'
> 
> I think that adding SKOS declarations to SOME OWL declarations is a win-win.
> 
> While OWL statements are always domain 'object' specfic and not always
> about disambiguating natural language 'terms' .. when the object of a OWL
> declaration is ALSO a term in a Common Vocabulary .. SKOS helps explain
> how a set of specific national language terms / symbols are used in that
> community of practice.

Can you give an concrete example?


Of course in OWL you can do complex statements about let's say Chemical
reactions and refer to chemical elements or compounds, for instance
model the reaction of nitrogen and hydrogen in Haber-Bosch process

    N2 + 3H2 = 2NH3

can described with a special Ontology. Let's say the identifiers used are

r:HaberProcess  for the whole process
c:N             for Nitrogen
c:H             for Hydrogen
c:NH3           for Ammonia

and you use some chemical ontology properties to define the special
relations between these objects.


At the same time you can create a Concept Scheme in SKOS about the same
chemical elements

c:N
  skos:prefLabel  "Nitrogen"@en
  skos:altLabel   "N"@zxx

c:H
  skos:prefLabel "Hydrogen"@en
  skos:altLabel  "H"@zxx

c:NH3
  skos:prefLabel "Ammonia"@en
  skos:altLabel "NH3"@zxx

r:HaberProcess
  skos:repfLabel "Haber-Bosch process"@en
  skos:narrower  c:N
  skos:narrower  c:H
  skos:narrower  c:NH3


But you can also use any other vocabulary, for instance Dublin Core:

r:HaberProcess
  dc:Description "The Haber Process is the reaction of nitrogen and
hydrogen to produce ammonia."@en
  dct:hasPart  c:N
  dct:hasPart  c:H
  dct:hasPart  c:NH3


So what? That's the whole idea behind Semantic Web.


The point is: The relation between OWL and SKOS is *not* more important
than the relation to any other RDF vocabulary.

Greetings,
Jakob

Received on Thursday, 2 November 2006 17:15:06 UTC