Re: Side question : mapping OWL classes to SKOS concepts Re: SKOS Guide and owl:sameAs

Hi,

> Well I'm not sure what you mean exactly by an "off-line conversion of 
> the ontology to SKOS", and as said above, I'm not even sure if such an 
 > expression makes sense at all. First it sounds like you're thinking
 > there is a single and systematic way to convert OWL to SKOS, and I 
hope

No, that's not what I meant.

> it's not the case. Second, it would lead folks to think that SKOS and 
> OWL are just two languages to model the same things differently, which 
> IMO is plainly wrong. Actually I hope the ongoing SKOS standardization 

The problem you are having is twofold:

1- two different ways to model the world (backoffice/front: one in 
terms of stars, another in terms of hotel quality)

2- two different languages to describe domain models (OWL/SKOS: one as 
a formal class hierarchy, another in loose broader/narrower hierarchy)

I am suggesting that problem 1 has nothing to do with problem 2; they 
are orthogonal. To solve problem 1, you need domain specific rules to 
convert information from one domain model to the other (from stars to 
quality). You can:
- specify rules in some programming language that convert at runtime
- specify rules in RDF that get interpreted at runtime

To solve problem 2 you probably can use some static rules but like you 
suggest might need some specific ones like you seem to be doing 
(relating a SKOS concept to specific classes, instances,...)

With my "offline" remark I was suggesting that whatever solutions to 1 
and 2 you have in place now, you can do the conversions from the OWL 
data (backend) to the SKOS model (frontend) at "design time" (e.g. 
once a day on your server), not at "runtime" (e.g. each time a query 
about a Hotel comes in).

Hope I'm still making sense...
Mark.


-- 
  Mark F.J. van Assem - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
        markREMOVE@cs.vu.nl - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark

Received on Friday, 3 November 2006 09:17:07 UTC