Re: RE : shos:indexingRule ? Re: Side question : mapping OWL classes to SKOS concepts

Antoine

Antoine Isaac a écrit :
>
> I think like Mark that I can understand your sentiment, and in fact 
> you might have (partly) misunderstood  my proposal. I said that the 
> 'ontology' specifying the indexing rule could be specified in an RDF 
> file/source *different from the ontology one*.
>
OK, I must admit I missed that point in your proposal.
>
> This way, you could have your canonical ontology describing the core 
> understanding of hotels and so on, plus an 'indexing ontology' that 
> you would activate for your specific application, the same way you 
> would load indexing rules in another rule language. I think this 
> proposal is not fundamentally different from Jakob's one from the 
> 'architecture'/'modularity' view. And it has the nice aspect of having 
> the rules specified in a way homogeneeous with your ontology and SKOS 
> concept scheme. With Jakob's solution you still have to manage the 
> link between your classes/concepts in OWL/SKOS and your SPARQL 
> queries, what actually you try to do in the following...
>
Understood. This make sense in a fully Semantic Web integrated 
environment, of which indexing ontology is a piece.
>
> ...
> > Forcing existing technologies to go through complete OWL migration
> > before starting to play in SW field makes a too steep adoption curve,
> > and is certainly the best way to make them fly away.
>
> I understand your point, and think your proposal is really interesting 
> (including the comparison with scope notes). But we should be sure 
> that having SKOS concept schemes overburdened with rules that are 
> specific to very specific engines will not deter your users the same 
> way that creating auxiliary OWL knowledge sources would have done!
>
Sure enough. But actually I was thinking of exchanges between 
applications making sense of the rules. For other, the same vocabulary 
could come in different flavors, some without rules, some with specific 
rules. Same concepts and concept hierarchy, but annotated (I see 
skos:indexingRule as aka annotation property, like IMO skos:note) 
different ways for different uses/users.
>
>
> PS: Jakob and Bernard, when you talk about SKOS simplicity, don't 
> forget that SKOS specification (and therefore proper use of SKOS) 
> sometimes rely on OWL-like features like property transitivity 
> ('characteristic' of  [1]) and even rules that are simple but out of 
> OWL scope ('comment' in [2])
>
You're right, simplicity does not mean "don't use OWL at all", but "OWL 
has a lot a features more expressive/complex than the ones needed for 
the task at hand". That said, the average user of any tool (language, 
software, hardware, OS ...) uses only a small fraction of its features :-)
But there again I think in line with Alistair's current focus on 
applications, we should stress the difference between SKOS and OWL more 
in terms of use cases than in terms of a priori complexity/expressivity. 
Coming back to the original indexing rule issue, seems that the use case 
is clearly  in the SKOS scope if 1) I have a (simple in the sense of 
SKOS) controlled vocabulary, 2) I have resources I want to index against 
its concepts, and 3) I want to make that indexing a rule-based process, 
partially or fully automatic. The rules themselves can be arbitrarily 
complex, from simple match of metadata values, to complex rules calling 
a very smart expert system in back-office (including text mining tools, 
asking human expert X or Y for cases impossible to decide by automatic 
rules), so if "simple" is the target, expression of rules themselves 
should be out of SKOS scope.

Bernard

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Monday, 13 November 2006 14:16:04 UTC