Re: ISSUE-95 Discussions

Agree, it is certainly used by W3C vocabularies. But the industry work
doesnąt seem to follow this practice.

For example:

schema.org had an outdated version that uses this property, but in a
totally different way:

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://schema.org/Action˛>
<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Class˛/>
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en">Action</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en˛/>
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="http://schema.org/Thing˛/>
<rdfs:isDefinedBy rdf:resource="http://schema.org/Action˛/>
</rdf:Description>

FIBO doesnąt use it at all.

AGROVAC doesnąt use it.

Life Sciences vocabularies donąt seem to use it.

I canąt recall seeing anyone in the industry use it when developing their
own ontologies.

Just to be clear, I am not advocating not using this convention for SHACL.
I am simply wondering what is the motivation for this practice and why it
is so rarely followed outside of the standard models published by W3C.

Irene Polikoff






On 1/24/16, 11:47 PM, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

>I was hoping that the Linked Open Vocabulary project could help answer
>this as they provide states on property use across over 550 vocabs.
>However, their search system is broken.
>
>So instead I looked at the list of W3C vocabularies,[1] and only one
>(something called "Earl") did not use rdfs:isDefinedBy. All of the
>others did, and that list is:
>
>SKOS, DataCube, DCAT, ORG, vCARD, ADMS, REORG
>
>I looked at the Open Annotation vocabulary,[2] which I know is close to
>being completed, and it, too, uses rdfs:isDefinedBy.
>
>I think this shows that this *is* a W3C best practice.
>
>kc
>[1] https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdfvocabs#w3c_all
>[2] http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130208/
>
>On 1/24/16 4:07 PM, Irene Polikoff wrote:
>> There is no harm in using rdfs:isDefinedBy and may be some value in it.
>> I am not totally sure what it is though.
>>
>> In practice, it is very rarely used for instances. Because it is not
>> practical, I guess, to always carry this extra triple. It is sometimes
>> used for schemas, but certainly far from universally used. So, from the
>> software perspective, it canąt be relied on ­ unless the person who
>> writes software has full control over what schemas they use and how they
>> look like.
>>
>> As for living with other vocabularies in a triple store, this wouldn't
>> require rdfs:isDefinedBy. The best practice is to have each vocabulary
>> as a separate named graph and then one could always query for its
>> content in SPARQL using FROM or FROM GRAPH.
>>
>>
>> Irene Polikoff, CEO
>>
>> TopQuadrant, Inc. www.topquadrant.com <http://www.topquadrant.com/>
>>
>> *Technology providers making enterprise information meaningful*
>>
>> Blogs ‹ http://www.topquadrant.com/the-semantic-ecosystems-journal/,
>> http://www.topquadrant.com/composing-the-semantic-web/
>>
>> LinkedIn ‹ https://www.linkedin.com/company/topquadrant
>>
>> Twitter - https://twitter.com/topquadrant
>>
>>
>>
>> From: Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com
>> <mailto:holger@topquadrant.com>>
>> Date: Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 6:45 PM
>> To: "public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org <mailto:public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>"
>> <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org <mailto:public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>>
>> Subject: Re: ISSUE-95 Discussions
>> Resent-From: <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org
>> <mailto:public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>>
>> Resent-Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 23:46:09 +0000
>>
>>> No, rdfs:isDefinedBy is the way to link an RDF term with its ontology.
>>> My XSLT relies on that. It also lets vocab information live in a
>>> triple store with other vocabs. You can then get all the terms for a
>>> given vocab using a SPARQL query.
>>
>> Again, I don't like carrying around extra triples just for the sake of a
>> particular XSLT implementation. These triples are trivial to
>> auto-generate at any point in time. Having said this, for the purpose of
>> making progress I will try to edit them in (although I expect this to be
>> error-prone). Better would be to leave them out for now and put them
>> back in on the day prior to publication.
>
>-- 
>Karen Coyle
>kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>m: 1-510-435-8234
>skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600
>

Received on Monday, 25 January 2016 05:23:16 UTC