RE: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons' - ACL level of granularity?

> If there are aspects of FOAF that are of use to biomedical 
> science (I'm not sure what these are), then these should be 
> separated out into a minimal ontology. If people want to 
> reason over databases to determine if genotypes correlate 
> with foaf:OnlineGamingAccount then they can do so by linking 
> the appropriate ontologies, but foaf:jabberID must be 
> strictly separated from ontologies for doing science.

+1

That is my feelings too.  I have always thought that one of ontology design
principles should make each ontology's conceptual domain "orthogonal" to
each other.  Although there is no object criteria to determine the "domain
orthogonality", it is still more of an art than science.  Nevertheless, it
is something that we should keep in mind when designing ontology, orthogonal
ontologies improve each ontology's sharing and reuse.

With regard to FOAF, I agree with Chris that it might be better if FOAF can
separate the Person into a different ontology, somewhere in the scope of the
vCard.  Agent etc., might as well be another minimimal top ontologies.

IMHO, inadequate separation of ontology's domain will have some serious side
effects in the long run.  Aside from wasted bandwidth and computation to
handle the unnecessary statement, but when more ontologies are shared, the
chance for incur conflict will increase and makes the sharing ontology
impossible.

Xiaoshu

Received on Saturday, 16 September 2006 03:19:54 UTC