Re: Introducing Vocabularies of a Friend (VOAF)

Hi Egon

2011/1/15 Egon Willighagen <egon.willighagen@gmail.com>

> Hi Bernard,
>
> Maybe it's just Saturday morning, but what exactly is the goal of your
> VOAF effort? What problems with existing ontologies does it address?
> Just curious, as it sounds interesting...
>

There are no "problems" with existing ontologies. VOAF just aims at easing
their discovery. I think Kingsley has shown by a few applications the
potential of such an interlinking. I've very often the question : what
vocabularies can I use for my data, and how can I discover them. VOAF is a
tool addressing this question.

It can help to put in light which vocabularies have a good practice of
reusing and relying existing ones, and which reinvent everything in their
namespace. Having quick access on creators and publishers (those data are
yet largely to complete in the current dataset) is also linking the
vocabularies to the community creating them etc etc.

Next step for example I would like to add terminological links between
vocabularies using the same term, using lexvo.org ontology, such as to add

<http://lexvo.org/id/term/eng/event>  lvont:means  <
http://purl.org/vocab/bio/0.1/Event>

<http://lexvo.org/id/term/eng/event>  lvont:means  <
http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Event>

<http://lexvo.org/id/term/eng/event>  lvont:means  <
http://www.aktors.org/ontology/portal#Event >

This might help curators of those various ontologies to wonder if they
needed to duplicate the class in their own vocabulary, and the data curator
wanting to publish data about events to look up those various flavours of
"Event" before picking her choice ...

And as Kingsley says this is just the beginning of what you can imagine ...

Bernard


-- 
Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Vocabulary & Data Engineering
Tel:       +33 (0) 971 488 459
Mail:     bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
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