concern about the definition of ontology in the ontology document

Dear all,

I think that readers of the ontology document
http://dev.w3.org/2008/video/mediaann/mediaont-1.0/mediaont-1.0.html
might have some troubles making the link between the (very correct)  
definition of what an ontology is, in section 2, and the proposal of  
the group (a list of properties defined in prose, not in a formal  
language). The text of the ontology document is copied below, followed  
by a line I propose to add to make the link clearer. What do you think?

Best regards,
Véronique

"An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared, machine- 
readable vocabulary and meanings, in the form of various entities and  
relationships between them, to describe knowledge about the contents  
of one or more related subject domains throughout the life cycle of  
its existence. These entities and relationships are used to represent  
knowledge in the set of related subject domains. Formal refers to the  
fact that the ontology should be representable in a formal grammar.  
Explicit means that the entities and relationships used, and the  
constraints on their use, are precisely and unambiguously defined in a  
declarative language suitable for knowledge representation. Shared  
means that all users of an ontology will represent a concept using the  
same or equivalent set of entities and relationships. Subject domain  
refers to the content of the universe of discourse being represented  
by the ontology"

I propose to add something like:
"In this recommendation, the vocabulary in question is the list of  
core properties (relationships) defined in the ma namespace, and the  
machine-readable format is not specified here: the recommendation  
provides a simple text description and definition of the  
relationships. An implementation of the vocabulary in RDF [1] has been  
developed in the MAWG RDF? task force [2]. Implementations in  
different formats are nevertheless allowed.

[1] http://www.w3.org/RDF/
[2]ref to the URL of the document of the modeling task force

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 11:55:12 UTC