- From: Bernhard Schandl <bernhard.schandl@univie.ac.at>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:59:07 +0200
- To: public-lod@w3.org, public-semweb-ui@w3.org
Hi, a couple of times now I ran into misunderstandings by students regarding a common visualization style of property domain/range relationships in ontologies. Actually, it is quite common to draw diagrams of ontologies in a style similar to ER diagrams, where classes are represented as ellipses, and properties that have these classes as domain/range are represented as arcs between these ellipses (e.g. [1], which is meant to describe the domain and range for foaf:holdsAccount). However many "newbies" to RDF and ontologies are confused by this, because the triple foaf:Agent foaf:holdsAccount foaf:OnlineAccount . is actually not contained in the ontology. It's hard to explain them the difference between this way of representing ontologies and the graphical representation of the actual triples. Thus I ask everyone to reconsider the way you visualize ontologies in publications, tutorials, etc. to make them consistent with the "normal" way of graphical RDF notation. [1] <http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/schandl/2009/06/domain+range_bad.png> [2] <http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/schandl/2009/06/domain +range_better.png> Best, Bernhard
Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 09:59:43 UTC