RE: Re-using terms from existing vocabularies (was: Re: Typos)

I’ll attempt to revive this question:

I understand the dilemma.
If you create a new class, then it draws people away from using the existing one, and breaks interoperability with the users of the old one.

I guess you also considered and discounted
locn:Location owl:equivalentClass dcterms:Location .
?
It basically moves the class into a new namespace, while also leaving it where it was.

Perhaps the issue is that if an ontology is composed from mixed namespaces, the tools don’t make it so easy to see all the members of the vocabulary.
The OWL spec doesn’t help since the notion of ‘ontology’ is rather informal – in the specs it refers to a ‘document’, but there is no specific OWL property to link from an ontology resource to the classes and properties that belong to it.
Putting them in a single namespace is one option.

[rdfs:isDefinedBy is sometimes used to point up from classes and property definitions to the ontology that owns then, but this is very much convention and is not universally adopted, and sometimes used to point elsewhere.
Sometimes I use dcterms:hasPart to point the other direction, from an owl:Ontology to its members. ]

Simon

From: Andrea Perego [mailto:andrea.perego@jrc.ec.europa.eu]
Sent: Friday, 3 January 2014 11:50 PM
To: Raphaël Troncy; Ghislain Atemezing
Cc: LocAdd W3C CG Public Mailing list; Bernard Vatant; Phil Archer
Subject: Re-using terms from existing vocabularies (was: Re: Typos)

(Original mail: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-locadd/2014Jan/0029.html. See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-locadd/2014Jan/0026.html)

Ghislain, Raphaël, thanks for raising this issue. I'm moving this discussion in a separate thread, since it concerns more in general the issue of how to re-use terms from existing vocabularies.

About defining a new class: Michael and I, along with the ISA CLV TF, decided not to do that, since we meant to promote the re-use of dcterms:Location. Defining a class locn:Location, even as a subclass of dcterms:Location, would have had the opposite effect.

We tried not to specify additional statements to the current definition of dcterms:Location (and possible future changes). This is why dcterms:Location is not typed, and domain and range are left unspecified. But we had to add some annotation properties (plus vs:term_status and dcterms:identifier) to explain how it was meant to be re-used in the scope of the LOCN vocabulary.

Of course, the same applies to term "geographic identifier" (as spotted by Raphaël in [1]).

So, the question is: can we agree on a way to give a context to statements concerning the re-use of terms from existing vocabularies? Should we use, e.g., the PROV and/or Open Annotation data models, even though this would make the specification more complex?

@Bernard, I wonder whether you would like to contribute your view on this issue.

It may be also good to share this discussion with other WGs/CGs, who have already addressed / are going to address this and similar issues.

@Phil, any suggestion?

Thanks!

Andrea

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[1]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-locadd/2014Jan/0026.html


On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 6:17 PM, Raphaël Troncy <raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr<mailto:raphael.troncy@eurecom.fr>> wrote:
Yes, indeed! It is http://www.w3.org/ns/locn#dcterms:Location


... but it seems to me that this is a bad practice anyway. Either the vocab wants to re-use the dcterms:Location class and it should not hijack its definition OR it needs its own specific class and it should not give it for QNAME an existing QNAME.


  Raphaël

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Raphaël Troncy
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Andrea Perego, Ph.D.
European Commission DG JRC
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