Re: Why RDF? was: ISSUE-160: Allowing collections in semantic relationships

I was going to say the same thing as Ed :)

URIs, RDF and SPARQL are useful tools where you want to join data from
different sources. You can use them to do things like:

http://openflydata.org/search/gene-expression

Gene name data from one source (flybase) is used to join data from
three other sources. Not a reasoner in sight :)

Cheers,

Alistair

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 06:16:39PM +0100, Antoine Isaac wrote:
>
> Leonard, Ed,
>
>>> But if it is just for publication and exchange, why bother putting it into
>>> an RDF framework? There are various simpler formats that have been used in
>>> the past for the exchange of thesaurus data. I thought that the point of RDF
>>> was to make it amenable to machine reasoning.
>>
>>> From my perspective the really powerful thing that SKOS provides as a
>> semantic web application are web identifiers (URIs) for concepts.
>>
>> Minting URIs for your concept schemes and concepts allows them to be
>> referenced and resolved easily. This allows descriptions of resources
>> to unambiguously use SKOS concepts, while also providing a means for
>> mapping concepts from different concept schemes together.
>
> And I'd add a graph, [1] at [2]: this is the kind of thing that is more difficult to do without RDF.
> As a matter of fact the only two linked-data SKOS examples I know of, [3] and [4], are already connected (ok, partially, but that shows the direction to go!).
>
> And further RDF is not about reasoning. That's more RDFS and OWL. And even then, reasoning based on incomplete semantic specification can still prove useful...
>
> Antoine
>
>
> [1] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/lod-datasets_2008-09-18.html
> [2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData
> [3] http://lcsh.info
> [4] http://libris.kb.se
>

-- 
Alistair Miles
Senior Computing Officer
Image Bioinformatics Research Group
Department of Zoology
The Tinbergen Building
University of Oxford
South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3PS
United Kingdom
Web: http://purl.org/net/aliman
Email: alistair.miles@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1865 281993

Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2008 12:00:11 UTC