Re: beyond 'formal' relations: describing relations between scientific and non-scientific material

The distinctions you are discussing are the motivation for
the tabula rasa hierarchy (see http://mkrmke.org)

existent
    group  # abstract Entity
    entity  # physical Entity
    characteristic  # property
        attribute
        part
        action
        interaction
        relation
    proposition

attribute, part, action are single-entity properties
interaction, relation are multiple-entity properties

But I must admit that the distinction between action
and interaction depends on your point of view.

For example, I consider give to be an action,
and marry to be an interaction.
Expressed in mKR (see http://mkrmke.org)

    John Doe do give od a book to Mary Smith done;
    John Doe, Mary Smith ido marry done;

Dick McCullough
http://mkrmke.org
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: paola.dimaio@gmail.com 
  To: Pat Hayes 
  Cc: Dennis - UT ; semantic-web@w3.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 11:43 AM
  Subject: Re: beyond 'formal' relations: describing relations between scientific and non-scientific material


  Pat
  since we are on the subject...

  I have seen some interesting work done in translating existing system documentation and even natural language texts directly to ontology languagages (UML to OWL) for example, and I seem to understand that some of this direct translation/mapping to OWL is not so straightforward ( impossible?).
   Would some of the reasons below contribute to such difficulties?

   It feels a pity that so much good knowledge that already exists cannot be reused on the web because of an OWL Knowledge representation bottleneck

  There must be a way of geetting around that


  PDM



  On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:32 PM, <paola.dimaio@gmail.com> wrote:

    Pat

    thanks, yes, it helps, by getting into the heart of the discussion



       However, this is only a convention, and there is no fundamental logical requirement why this must be done: OWL-Full, RDF and Common Logic all do not make any strong distinction between relations and other entities. 

    but somehow, I (and perhaps others) see the lack of such a fundamental disctinction and knowledge representation level the cause of confusion, possible brittleness, at at user/pragmatic level, maybe even  a cognitive barrier 

    (I darn cant get my mind around simple things such as domain/ range definitions, I have to think three or four times at what I am doing /trying to do cause its awkward)

    for those who were brought up with data/modelling techniquest such as E/R such distinctions may be central  although there is flexibility as to what to model as what,  and properties are what we call attributes, I think

    I wonder if at some point the OWL community is willing to take feedback from users and engineers from different backgrounds, so that perhaps future generations of web ontology languages can be less counter intuitive and satisfy 
    different modelling requirements/criteria

    or at least, start thinking about it....

    cheers  
    pdm





      Hope this helps


      Pat Hayes


        , I would be intersted in a clarification of why/how is that so 


        Paola





        On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Dennis - UT <dv.eprints@gmail.com> wrote:

          Hi,

          We are currently working on a repository for OAI ORE resource maps (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc). In this system we are trying to describe relations between scientific publications and other material (both scientific and non-scientific). To do this we are planning to use several (RDF) vocabularies / ontologies. 

          A question is: how to cope with diversity in scientific disciplines and communication on the one hand and standardizing relation descriptions when aggregating publications about a certain topic? Vocabularies now available (FOAF, DCterms, etc) mainly restrict to formal relations and do not include relations concerning the content in a more detailed way than for instance 'dc:subject'. This may be the consequence of the diversity in scientific semantics. Is there any literature/article about this issue?

          An example case is describing relations between scientific publications and their 'application'. For example: a publication proposes certain changes, government policy makers later decide to create actual policies based on this information. So far we didn’t find any existing solution to describe such relations. Suggestions on existing vocabularies to describe / annotate such relations are very welcome, thanks!

          Kind regards,

          Dennis
          University of Twente










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