Re: ontology mapping etiquette (was What is the class of a Named Graph?)

On 22 Feb 2010, at 19:36, Jiří Procházka wrote:
>>> I wonder if we as a group of people
>>> interested in Semantic Web could come up with etiquette for ontology
>>> mapping.
>>
>> Interesting topic! My €0.02: If the other vocabulary is likely to  
>> be
>>
>> - more stable
>> - more mature
>> - more likely to be widely used
>> - more likely to be around for a longer time
>>
>> then you should map your terms to it. If not, don't.
>>
>> So IMO the rdfg vocabulary should map to the SPARQL Service  
>> Description
>> vocabulary as soon as it becomes REC, but SPARQL-SD should NOT map  
>> to rdfg.
>
> Hi Richard, that also seems reasonable to me at first, but when  
> thinking
> about it more thoroughly, there is value in both ontologies doing the
> mapping to the other.

Yes, if both sides agree, then two-way mappings are great. But this is  
only realistic if both vocabularies rate about equally on the criteria  
above. As an extreme example, it would be totally unrealistic to  
expect the RDFS vocabulary to link back to every vocabulary that has  
some sort of label/name property (all of which should be subproperties  
of rdfs:label).

<snip>
> Certain mapping statements make sense from PoV of one ontology, but  
> not
> the other.

I don't know what you mean. An example might help. But anyway, if you  
map to my ontology, but from my POV that mapping doesn't make sense,  
then I'm certainly not going to map back to yours.

<snip>
> If we allow ourselves to go a bit further, I thought it would be great
> if there was some community developed service which would in automated
> fashion give advice for improvement and rate user submitted (better  
> yet
> WoD collected) ontologies judging their quality of design - most
> importantly re-usability which basically means how is it aligned to
> other similar ontologies. This would be probably very difficult, at
> least because of varying opinions on this... I guess database  
> community
> has something to say about that.

I think that's a different issue. When it comes to rating the  
“quality” of a vocabulary, then the amount of mappings to other  
vocabularies is a very minor factor. First, because other things  
(especially amount of uptake and strength of the surrounding  
community) are much more important. Second, because adding the  
mappings is so easy. No vocabulary will succeed or fail because of its  
inclusion or lack of mappings.

Nevertheless, I agree that we need services that support us in finding  
high-quality vocabularies, and that help drive the improvement of  
existing ones. But it's a complex subject, there are many existing  
efforts (Watson, Talis Schema Cache, Falcons Concept Search,  
ontologydesignpatterns.org, and I probably missed a few), and to me  
it's not obvious what is the right approach.

Perhaps we don't need better ways of finding and creating  
vocabularies, but better ways of finding and creating communities  
around a domain that can then jointly agree on a vocabulary.

All the best,
Richard


>
> There are more things to talk about regarding this, but this is what I
> have in mind so far.
>
> Best,
> Jiri
>
>> Best,
>> Richard
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Jiri
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hope that helps.
>>>>
>>>> thanks,
>>>> .greg
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-service-description/#id41794
>>>>
>>>
>>
>

Received on Monday, 22 February 2010 20:45:25 UTC