- From: Pascal Hitzler <pascal.hitzler@wright.edu>
- Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 12:31:03 -0500
- To: Raphaël Troncy <raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr>, Sven Schade <sven.schade@jrc.ec.europa.eu>, <janowicz@ucsb.edu>, <public-locadd@w3.org>
On 1/10/2014 8:43 AM, Raphaël Troncy wrote: > Hello, > >>>> IMHO, you can just define whatever you want in your local >>>> namespace, give it as much semantics as possible (or necessary) >>>> and then have an additional layer of axioms that establishes >>>> alignments. Many companies will (or do) it this way anyway >>>> because they are afraid of giving up control. Will there be a >> >>>> FOAF in 5 years from now? >> >> Indeed, I strongly second Jano's statement here. Agreement on one >> (common) world view will never be reached - and is not really >> desirable. > > Nobody has argued for this. Let's be specific and not making general > statements. We are not talking about a company making a vocabulary but > about a community group within W3C trying to get consensus on a > vocabulary, and yes, the vocabularies hosted on http://www.w3.org/ns/ > are permanent[#]. > > Furthermore, we are talking about the particular case where a > class/property has been defined in a vocabulary A and that another > vocabulary B is about to define a class/property with the *same* > meaning, minor perhaps some usage note. If you're using the exactly same meaning (wrt. formal semantics), and can guarantee that this is stable over time (the vocabulary you use may get reworked), *and* you can guarantee that your twist on the meaning (which you introduce through your reuse) will not cause any inconsistencies if used jointly with all other usages elsewhere (which you can't control), then there is indeed no problem with reuse. However I would claim that you can essentially never guarantee this. And even if you can, guaranteeing it is probably much more work than it's worth :) Pascal. > We are not talking about a > different case. > > So, I would like to understand why you believe it is better to indeed > create this new class/property and add a > equivalentClass/equivalentProperty axiom rather than re-using the > existing class/property and potentially adding an additional usage note? > > I'm personally in favor of avoiding the creation of 200 different Person > classes if those ALL want to define Person in the same way. > >> Maximizing re-use certainly is a valuable principle, but practice >> shows us that many groups favor new developments instead of (often >> more expensive) investigation for and adoption of existing bits and >> pieces. > > This is what I call lazy ontology modeling. Do you have data that > backups this statement that "practice shows that groups favor new > developments"? My experience is the other way around, i.e. successful > vocabularies re-use small vocabularies. > Best regards. > > Raphaël > > [#] Quoting Phil, "Indefinitely meaning some time between the point > beyond which no one cares because technology has moved on and the heat > death of the universe." > -- Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler Dept. of Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH pascal@pascal-hitzler.de http://www.pascal-hitzler.de Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net
Received on Friday, 10 January 2014 17:31:34 UTC