Re: Ontology Wars? Concerned

Hi Nathan --

You may be interested in the following short paper about a system that 'puts
it all together'.

www.reengineeringllc.com/A_Wiki_for_Business_Rules_in_Open_Vocabulary_Executable_English.pdf

The system is online at the same site, and shared use is free.

Apologies if you have seen this before, and thanks for your comments,

                          -- Adrian

Adrian Walker
Reengineering



On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Many thanks so far for the invaluable input I've been getting from the
> community; I may be about to commit the cardinal sin here, but I'm a bit
> concerned and only saying this with the best intentions.
>
> Before I start, if I can be considered an early adopter then please do
> disregard the rest of this mail.
>
> I'm finding the path to entry in to the linked open data world rather
> difficult and confusing, and only for one specific reason - ontologies;
> it /feels/ like there are some kind of ontology wars going on and I can
> never get a definitive clear answer.
>
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but the primary focus for me is to use
> ontologies that people will be using in SPARQL (or alternative language)
> queries. Anything else appears to be a waste of time.
>
> Multiple properties in multiple languages that appear to describe the
> same thing make no logical sense to me whatsoever, and questioning my
> own programming capabilities here, I don't see how they will to a
> machine either.
>
> To put it in real terms, all I need to do is describe the relations
> between a URI and multiple other URIs, yet this is the blocker in my
> current project? - and it's really nothing complex (or shouldn't be);
> I've managed to get a grip on all the various concepts and formats,
> software, tools, methods, get everything set up, start consuming lod and
> correlating plain text entries up to URIs, yet still choosing which
> properties / ontologies to use is the blocker :(
>
> Please do tell me if this is just me missing something simple, if I can
> simply write up my own ontology and everybody else will be able to
> consume the data without any input from me; or me informing the world of
> the new ontology so they can consume and handle it, then great; but if
> not then surely this is a problem?
>
> My concern is on two levels here;
>
> 1: that my own path to entry is being slowed and indeed blocked by
> confusion over ontologies.
>
> 2: that many other people will find the same problems (or worse) and it
> could potentially be a show stopper for something so important.
>
>
> Just to clarify, I'm not dealing with big custom data sets here, I'm
> coming at LOD from the "normal" developer angle, writing systems that
> publish articles and such like; and whilst describing things like
> titles, authors, publish dates etc is all nice and simple ontology wise;
> I'm finding that describing what the content is about is virtually
> impossible - tags and subjects just don't cut it & the level of
> description of relations needs to be somewhat more fine-grained to be of
> any use.
>
> Many Regards & do hope I've caused no offence;
>
> Nathan
>
>