Why not to shortcut the "sense" object

Hi all,

As discussed today in the telco there is a proposal to introduce a shortcut
replacing "Entry ---sense--> Sense ---representedBy--> OntologyEntity" with
"Entry ---means--> OntologyEntity", while this is theory sounds good, I
contend that in practice it is not worth the effort. (This is based on
practical experience with the *lemon* model).

   - *It does not make the model easier to use*: It is clear that for data
   producers this proposal simplifies the matter (as less links and URIs are
   required), however for data consumers it complicates the models (as they
   need to understand both methods of linking and be able to infer equivalence
   between the two methods). Thus, if EaseOfUse = (% of Consumers) ×
   EaseOfUse(Consumer) + (% of Producers) × EaseOfUse(Producer), hence if we
   assume there will be approx. as many producers as consumer then we need
   only ask is it worth "is the extra effort for the producer less than that
   for the consumer", i.e., "would you rather implement a system that infers
   similarity across multiple representations, or use extra links and URIs"?
   - *It does not make the model easier to understand*: While, I understand
   that the sense object is nebulous and difficult per se to understand, I
   would still argue that the clearest measure of how easy to understand a
   model is, is the number of named elements it has (as many users may not
   need to deeply understand the meaning of a sense, but be happy to know that
   "translation", "antonymy" and "register" go there). Here the difference is
   1 named elements vs. 3 named elements, but as stated above, at least half
   of users (data consumers) will have to understand all 4 names... if we
   assume out of the producers 70% do not need to represent senses (and thus
   any associated properties, "translation", "antonymy", "register") then the
   average number of links a user will need to understand is 4 × 0.5 +
   3 × 0.5 × 0.3 + 1 × 0.5 × 0.7 = 2.8... so it makes the model all of 7%
   easier to understand! Worse, this figure is overgenerous as: I expect there
   to more data consumers than producers and I expect at least 50% of users to
   require sense modelling.

Regards,
John