- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:15:12 -0400
- To: Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@bi.fhg.de>
- Cc: "Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@boeing.com>, Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@izb.fraunhofer.de>, SW Best Practices <public-swbp-wg@w3.org>
* Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@bi.fhg.de> [2004-09-10 10:13+0200] > > On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 12:44:36PM -0700, Uschold, Michael F wrote: > > As I understand it, your point is that OWL should be used > > "out of the box" to represent a thesaurus language directly -- > > rather than using OWL first to represent some ad-hoc language > > of thesaurus relations and then, in turn, using that ad-hoc > > language to represent the thesaurus. > > > > [MFU] NO NO! I'm remaining agnoistic. The matter needs looking into. > > There may be benefits either way. Or there may be clear preferred > > choice. > > Mike, > > Have I correctly understood that you mean to say: > > There are two alternative ways one might use OWL to > express a thesaurus: One could use native OWL constructs to > represent thesaurus relations. Or one could use OWL first > to represent a language of thesaurus relations and then use > that relation language to represent the thesaurus itself. > > If so, I'm thinking the VM Note might state the issue, present > a few arguments each way, and point off to any available > sources of emerging solutions. Does that sound reasonable? The SKOS work is one such approach. It uses RDF (and bits of OWL I think) to describe relations like 'broader' that map to the way thesaurus-style systems describe the world. Re-modelling a thesaurus as an ontology is a seriously expensive and challenging effort; it'd be good to have better docs to assist those who attempt this, but more important is to make sure our enthusiasm for OWL modelling doesn't obscure the potential value of thesauri-in-RDF approaches... Maybe Alistair can comment further? Dan
Received on Friday, 10 September 2004 08:15:12 UTC