Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

Thank You for the link Melanie, but from what I see the OBI URIs have a
canonical form with numerical parts in the identifier. We have considered
the same for the CIDCO CRM to avoid language mono cultures etc. But this
does not meet Glenn's call for randomness I believe. Furthermore the OBI
URIs are resolvable (thank you! very much appropriated :-), something that
Glenn currently does not consider for his implementations but that's a
separate conversation.


On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:20 PM, Melanie Courtot <mcourtot@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Marco, all,
>
> We have been using numerical identifiers in OBI, the Ontology for
> Biomedical Investigations, and formalized this via the policy Alan sent out
> earlier (see http://www.obofoundry.org/id-policy.shtml)
> The OWL file is available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi.owl. You
> will see that all entities have a numerical URI (individuals, classes,
> properties...).
>
> Cheers,
> Melanie
>
>
>
> On 18-May-11, at 1:50 PM, Marco Neumann wrote:
>
>  Michael,
>>
>> indeed I did not not read Alan's email. I assume he refers to A-Box
>> identifiers only.
>>
>> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Michael F Uschold <uschold@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Marco Neumann <marco.neumann@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> Glenn,
>>
>> it's not feasible, nor enforceable, nor desirable to develop ontologies
>> entirely with random URIs as identifiers.
>>
>> Perhaps you have not seen Alan Ruttenberg's email on this topic. I think
>> they do exactly this.  It was no free lunch, they had a lot of work to do to
>> make this doable -- in large part because as Glenn says, the duality of:
>> "machines need to think in ids and people need to think in names" is not
>> well supported by tools or methodology.
>>
>> I am of the opinion that local names should indeed be designed with
>> meaningful names in mind last but not least to improve the ontology
>> engineering process. Though that said there might be exceptions such as NLP
>> and ML where automatic tagging and ontology creation with random URIs can
>> useful, but that's a special use case.
>>
>> Marco
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:55 PM, glenn mcdonald <glenn@furia.com> wrote:
>> I agree wholeheartedly that URIs should be pure identifiers, with no
>> embedded semantics or assumptions of readability. And I agree with Kingsley
>> that there's an elephant in the room. I might even agree with Kingsley about
>> what the elephant is.
>>
>> But to say it from my point of view: machines need to think in ids, people
>> need to think in names. The RDF/SPARQL "stack", such as it is, has not
>> internalized the implications of this duality, and thus isn't really
>> prepared to support both audiences properly. Almost all the canonical
>> examples of RDF and SPARQL avoid this issue by using toy use-cases with
>> semi-human-readable URIs, and/or with literals where there ought to be
>> nodes. If you try to do a non-trivial dataset the right way, you'll
>> immediately find that writing the RDF or the SPARQL by hand is basically
>> intractable. If you try to produce an human-intelligible user-interface to
>> such data, you'll find yourself clinging to rdfs:label for dear life, and
>> then falling, falling, falling...
>>
>> In fact, there's almost nothing more telling than the fact that rdfs:label
>> is rdfS! This is in some ways the most fundamental aspect of human/computer
>> data-interaction, and RDF itself has essentially nothing to say about it..
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Marco Neumann
>> KONA
>>
>> Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in San
>> Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN
>> http://www..lotico.com/evt/stc2011/
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Michael Uschold, PhD
>>   Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
>>   LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu
>>   Skype, Twitter: UscholdM
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Marco Neumann
>> KONA
>>
>> Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in San
>> Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN
>> http://www.lotico.com/evt/stc2011/
>>
>
> ---
> Mélanie Courtot
> MSFHR/PCIRN trainee, TFL- BCCRC
> 675 West 10th Avenue
> Vancouver, BC
> V5Z 1L3, Canada
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Marco Neumann
KONA

Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in San
Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN
http://www.lotico.com/evt/stc2011/

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 21:38:31 UTC