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

Xiaoshu Wang wrote:

> Hence, even if I don't disagree but just no use certain part of an ontology.
> How do I know if those who want to use my ontology but disagree the imported
> other part.  For example, if I develop a ex:Patient and make it a
> rdfs:subClassOf the foaf:Person.  Personally, I don't care the
> foaf:geekcodes.  But what if other, for example, Chris Mungall like my
> ex:Patient but not the foaf:geekcodes, it will force him to not use
> ex:Patient but develop another cm:Patient, where he might make a statement
> saying that "there is no such thing as foaf:geekcodes".  

Yup. It's one thing to define a fresh new vocabulary uncluttered with
tributes to our Internet forefathers. It's quite another to populate it
with machine readable critiques of sibling ontologies that hinder
simultaneous usage.  I guess you *could* write OWL that says something
like "there are no things that have any value for a foaf:geekcode
property". Or something slightly more conservative, "if it's got one of
those properties, it's not in the class my:Patient!". But such idioms
would serve little practical purpose, and would in fact be
usage/acknowledge of a vocabulary construct ('geekcode') which the
critiquer considers incoherent/pointless/foolish. In RDF/OWL it is hard
(and counter-productive) for one ontology to try to say "don't use that
one over there, it's crap!". Better to vote with one's feet, and to
allow users and other apps to pick-and-mix as they themselves prefer.

>> Another remark, which may be too obvious to be worth making, but here
>> goes: You can use a namespace, and thus the symbols from an 
>> ontology, without importing it.  In some cases, one does this 
>> just to declare that you want to use that symbol to avoid 
>> making up one of your own; and you don't need the axioms that 
>> formally constrain the symbol's meaning.  In other cases, 
>> there may be only a few such axioms, and you can simply copy 
>> them.  I don't know if this is a good idea.  We're getting 
>> into a whole mess of hard questions about version control, 
>> partial importing of ontologies, etc. etc. that I wish I had 
>> answers to.  
> 
> Do you mean just use the URI without importing it? If so, I am not sure how
> it will work?  One of the neat features of the web is its loosely coupled
> nature.  But you need to follow your nose to know more about the resource.
> Without "importing", i.e., to fetch the resource description from the
> namespace, what is the use of it?  For instance, if given a dubline core URI
> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator, without following the URI, I won't
> even know how I should label it.

Related problem: If I write, "my:title rdfs:subPropertyOf dc:title", ...
am I dragging all instance data that uses my:title into the commitments
of the dc: namespace? (including being owl Full, making DL reasoners
bluescreen, etc)?  It would be nice to have some conventions/standards
for making low-cost re-use / mappings of that kind. But right now we're
in a world where DL-compatible variants of the DC (and FOAF) namespaces
circulate in email, CVS, etc form, since such lightweight re-use doesn't
fit with the approach adopted in various OWL systems.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Sunday, 17 September 2006 12:07:06 UTC