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Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 07:11:49 -0500
From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
To: Rachel Heery <r.heery@UKOLN.AC.UK>
Cc: NKOS@dli2.nsf.gov, danbri@w3.org
Subject: Re: Questions about CORES Schema Creation/Registration Workshop announcement
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* Rachel Heery <r.heery@UKOLN.AC.UK> [2003-02-18 11:43+0000]
> On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Linda Hill wrote:
[...]
> I think its interesting that the increasing use of the term 'ontologies',
> particularly in the Grid and eScience community, often seems to be used
> (althoug some might argue not strictly correctly) to encompass both
> 'element set' and 'controlled vocabularies'.... in that both sorts of
> thing can be used to deduce equivalences and other relationships between
> terms.

Hi Rachel,

I think this is something we see in general wherever RDF is involved, too, 
since RDF encourages one to take a common view of thesauri, data modelling, 
ontologies and traditional flatter attribute/value metadata systems. The 
interesting thing is that when converting a thesaurus-style controlled 
vocab into RDF, you get to choose whether to take the ontological route, and 
define an RDF vocab with classes and properties capturing the 
domain being described, or take a more lexical route and define an 
RDF vocab with classes and properties capturing the terms from the thesaurus.

ie. distinction between

[fido]--bt--->[Dog] ---bt--->[Mammal] ('lexical', loosly)
[fido]--type-->[Dog] --subClassOf--> [Mammal] ('ontological', class centric)

The latter is generally preferred by RDF / onto folk, but is often easier 
to do the former mechanically when the source thesaurus hasn't been 
prepared with this sort of modelling in mind...

Dan