Re: How to find a proper ontology for my classes and properties?

These are the issues we are addressing at the SERES workshop, ISWC 2010.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/pcm/tempISWC/workshops/SERES2010/index.html

it is about ontology repositories, what do we need from them, why, what
infrastructure do we need? etc etc.

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 10:22 PM, Lee Feigenbaum <lee@thefigtrees.net>wrote:

> On 10/30/2010 10:40 AM, Juriy Katkov wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone!
>> I have 2 questions about rdf data.
>>
>> 1. Suppose I started describing something in triples and I want to use a
>> property 'hasOwner'. I understand that it's much better to use this
>> property from one of the existing ontologies rather than use property
>> from my own namespace.
>> The question is: what is the easyest and the most right way to search
>> for this property? I know, there is Swoogle and sometimes it helps me
>> with that. I wonder if there is something better that fulltext search.
>>
>
> There've been some great suggestions on this thread, but allow me to offer
> the viewpoint that in many cases trying to find a predicate to reuse is not
> worth the effort.
>
> The main goal of reuse is to allow your data to be consumed by software
> tools that already know how to interpret an existing vocabulary. If that's
> the case for your domain then great, it makes a lot of sense to reuse the
> predicate. If that's not the case, or if you don't know if it's the case and
> you find an arbitrary predicate that seems to convey the meaning you're
> looking for, then I don't think there's much point in reusing vocabulary.
> I'd rather save the time searching, mint my own property, and get on with
> whatever I'm working on.
>
> Down the road if I see (or am told of) an application consuming similar SW
> data using a different predicate, I can always update my data then and still
> reap the benefits of reuse. Updating my data could be as simple as adding
> rdfs:subPropertyOf or owl:equivalentProperty relations, or--if in a
> reasonerless world--using a straightforward SPARQL Update statement to
> augment your data.
>
> Reuse is great but, like code optimizations, it's often not necessary
> upfront. It can be added later on once the real value of the reuse is
> understood. And if you never see the value of reuse, then your data and/or
> applications can flourish with the predicate that you minted for yourself,
> and you saved yourself the time otherwise spent searching in the first
> place.
>
> Lee
>
>
>
>> 2. Suppose I face the dataset I never use before. What do you usually do
>> first to get a first impression about the dataset? At the moment I first
>> make some SPARQL queries to this dataset, such as:
>> select COUNT(?x) WHERE
>> {
>> ?x a ?z .
>> }
>>
>> than I use Marbles or Sig.ma to surf randomly over this data and finally
>> I come up with a opinion where I need data from the dataset or not.
>> Again, what do you usually do? Is there a tools or useful queries that
>> can help Semantic Web user in browsing data and getting useful info
>> about datasets?
>>
>> Thank you in advance!
>>
>> Yury Katkov
>>
>
>


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