Re: Ontology Wars? Concerned

Bill Roberts wrote:
> Hi Nathan
> 
> I think you have to try harder than that to cause offence!
> 
> I think an attempt at standardisation on the one 'true' set of
> ontologies is futile, not scalable and ultimately a dead end.  However,
> using suitable existing ontologies in a sensible way leads to a kind of
> lingua franca of properties and classes that supports a useful interchange.
> 
> If you are both creating the markup and writing the SPARQL then you
> don't really have a problem.  The difficulty I suppose is trying to
> maximise the chance of independently created query tools and data sets
> talking to each other meaningfully.  I don't think there is a miracle cure.
> 
> As Kingsley explained, you can define mappings between ontologies - and
> these mappings might be for a specific purpose, maybe not universally
> valid.  Such a mapping  combined with some reasoning can increase the
> capabilities of automatic tools.  Ultimately, for maximum accuracy, some
> human input is probably going to be required for data normalisation
> and/or query design.  But whatever happens, by using linked data your
> properties are uniquely identified and someone can track down what the
> properties mean and how they are used, so interoperability is possible,
> if not always 'for free'.
> 

nicely summarised; thanks again bill.

feeling suitably mentored by the group(s)! will have to buy you all a
beer when this project is over.

thanks again,

nathan

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 20:00:54 UTC