RE: SWEET (but not friendly) ontologies

Dear Bernard,

 

I was using SWEET ontologies in a EU project Diligent (my univ as
sub-contractor of ESA), though just in a experimental setting for a semantic
annotation tool. My experience is that they not only got lot of mutual links
between them (importing any one of them was in most of the case equivalent
to importing all the suite) and *only* them, but also suffered from other
problems, they never seemed thought for really being ontologies: not only is
metadata missing as u reported, but the properties were really few and not
describing with any details all the available concepts, also, they were not
semantically well founded: the IS-A hierarchy very often was confounded with
the type relationship

Think they could do a much better job if rethought as SKOS dictionaries,

Cheers,

Armando

P.S. I worked mostly with version 1.0, however, at a first glance, version
2.0 did not seem to address above issues

 

From: public-lod-request@w3.org [mailto:public-lod-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Bernard Vatant
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 2:14 PM
To: Linking Open Data
Subject: SWEET (but not friendly) ontologies

 

Hello all

Gathering vocabularies for the growing VOAF dataset [1] leads to the
discovery of a bunch of linking and resusing good practice (good news) but
also makes obvious in comparison some data islands, apparently isolated from
everyything else whatsoever in the Cloud.

The SWEET ontologies developed by NASA [2] [3] seem to be in that case. We
have there a set of about 200 interlinked ontologies for Earth and
Environment sciences, but neither relying on any external namespace, nor
bearing any kind of metadata (creator, date, publisher, rights ...) to which
we are used in "friendly" vocabularies. SWEET ontologies don't seem used in
any VOAF vocabulary or CKAN package I've met so far. And the homepage has
not even a contact email to cc this message :(

I've heard that NASA uses those ontologies internally, but could not find
any pointer to that kind of use.

This is really a sad observation given the size of the work and the reliable
organization backing up this effort, those ontologies should be linked to
and from many other vocabularies!

So, if anyone has used one of SWEET vocabularies in a dataset or extend it
in some vocabulary, please send pointers! 
And if someone behind SWEET ontologies is lurking on this list, I would be
happy to make contact :)

Bernard

[1] http://www.mondeca.com/foaf/voaf-vocabs.rdf
[2] http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/
[3] http://sweet.jpl.nasa.gov/2.1/

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