Re: http://ld2sd.deri.org/lod-ng-tutorial/

Hi Dan,

I'm afraid I don't completely follow the history of the discussion
that Martin is raising, but the reason he has included me on the CC
list is because during a chat at SemTech last week, he asked me what I
thought about owl:imports. I said that I was actually using it in my
RDFa processor; after parsing a document, the processor queries the
triple store to see if any of the triples have an owl:imports
predicate, and if they do, the referenced document is loaded.

I have no particular opinion on whether owl:imports is a good solution
or not. The reason I adopted it was because I wanted some way to
modularise the ontologies I was creating on argot-hub; for example, I
have some documents that contain nothing but a single SKOS collection,
and I thought it would be a good idea to allow those to be used in
other ontologies.

So, if owl:imports is wrong that's fine, but what then is best
practice for importing small parts of a document into a larger whole?
If you're not using owl:imports in FOAF, then what do you use?

Or is the general approach to put the whole ontology into one document
(which is not how I'd like to proceed)?

(Actually...I'm getting a horrible feeling that I'm going to be told
that people do owl:sameAs to reference one ontology within another --
i.e., one term at a time. I really hope not. :))

Regards,

Mark

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 8:58 PM, Dan Brickley<danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> Yup, re owl:imports, I enthusiastically added it to the FOAF spec when some
> OWL WG insider suggested it was the right thing to use, and dutifully
> removed it when someone (I forget who in both cases - quite possibly same
> person!) a few years later told me it had fallen from fashion within the OWL
> scene.
>
> Re attitudes to OWL ... I do agree there have in the distant past (ie. last
> year!) been a few casually dismissive remarks around here regarding OWL.
> It's all too easy for a healthy enthusiasm for practical tools to trick us
> into seeing tools that we're not so familiar with as impractical. I'm happy
> to have read plenty of useful discussion here and nearby about how best to
> use or augment owl:sameAs. FOAF is a described using OWL. I expect some day
> in the not too distant future, Dublin Core Terms will be described in OWL
> too. And the community on public-lod@w3.org have been excellent champions of
> both. Things aren't too polarised, despite the occasional lapses into "them
> and us"-ism...
>
> Optimistically,
>
> Dan
>
>



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Received on Monday, 22 June 2009 20:44:42 UTC