Re: SemWeb terminology page

On Sat, Dec 04, 2010 at 11:40:54AM +0100, Antoine Isaac wrote:
> >We're getting off on a tangent a bit here, but the definition
> >at [1] says: "An OWL ontology may include descriptions
> >of classes, properties and their instances."  It doesn't
> >actually say "OWL classes" and "OWL properties" - and for
> >that matter, it only says "may"!  I'm curious whether
> >formal definitions of "ontology" explicitly require OWL -
> >or explicitly _exclude_ sets of (non-OWL) RDF properties and
> >classes.  No time to chase this one right now...
> >
> >[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-guide-20040210/#Owl_Ontology_definition
> 
> Don't forget that this is the definition of an "OWL ontology". I think it 
> is in fact quite self-referential: an "OWL ontology" is a dataset defined 
> with the constructs brought by OWL, and that's it :-)

However the definition quoted above is not actually explicit
about the properties and classes needing to be "OWL"
constructs.  I'm guessing there is a more formal definition
in one of the other OWL specifications, but maybe not...?

> But anyway, that's not important, I don't think the SW community would balk 
> on "controlled vocabularies" as Jeff said.
> On the other end, I'd be against using "ontology" for Group 2 since, as you 
> put it, "ontologies" (which feature of course OWL ontologies) may include 
> *any kind* of individuals (using owl:Individual), which brings us too far. 
> Group 2 should focus only on these things which would give rise to (RDFS or 
> OWL) classes and properties, i.e., "RDF vocabularies".

Agreed.

Tom

-- 
Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Saturday, 4 December 2010 14:43:26 UTC