Re: telco this Friday, 15:00 (CET)

Philipp,

unfortunately (or fortunately) I'm leaving for my summer vacation this 
evening, and I won't be able to make the call tomorrow, I'll be reading 
mails occasionally in the following days.

As for the main point:

> 
> 1) Strong vs. weak linking
> 
> Guido has recommended that we do not create formal links to other 
> models, e.g. by equivalentClass or subClassOf axioms, but we use "weak" 
> and "informal" links through rdfs:comment and the like.
>  From a SW perspective, this approach is non-orthodox I think. The whole 

> SW is about formalization. Informal links can not be used by machines to 

> align datasets, do distributed querying etc. Informal links in this 
> sense are only documentation and for human inspection and reasoning. 
> This is exactly what the SW wants to avoid, i.e. that we always have to 
> appeal to intuition of people ;-)
> I do not have a very strong position on this issue, but if some of us 
> would still give a few cents for the SW idea, then we should go for a 
> more formal and thus stronger linking. Just my two cents.
> 

There's no room to start a discussion on the SW vision here, but let me 
point out that formally linking to existing ontologies means embracing all 
the commitments of those ontologies, which would require a careful and 
reasoned examination. If we want to design our model as a plain extension 
of existing ones, a complete analysis of all available proposals should be 
taken into consideration. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think 
this study is available already. I would suggest to keep links to external 
resources as informative for now, we could promote them to the rank of 
formal axioms once we understand all the onto-logical implications and 
agree on them. 

Hope that helps!

Guido Vetere
Manager, Center for Advanced Studies IBM Italia
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