Re: data schema / vocabulary / ontology / repositories

Hello everybody,

Am 14.03.2011 09:28, schrieb Martin Hepp:
> Hi Dieter:
>
> There are several ontology repositories available on-line, but to my knowledge they all suffer from two serious limitations:
>
> 1. They do not rate ontologies by quality/relevance/popularity, so you do not get any hint whether foaf:Organization or foo:Organization will be the best way to expose your data.

I think, we discussed this issue already sometime ago. A conclusion (at 
least for me) was that it is quite difficult to achieve such a ranking 
quite objective over a very broad range of ontologies that are 
available. It depends often on the complexity of the knowledge 
representation (level of detail) a developer likes to achieve. This is 
the advantage of the Semantic Web. There wouldn't never be an ontology 
for a specific domain that rules all use case in it well.

> 2. The selection of ontologies listed is, to say the best, often biased or partly a random choice. I do not know any repository that
> - has a broad coverage,
> - includes the top 25 linked data ontologies and

I think, people are looking for an ontology that fit their purpose, 
i.e., popularity is good, however, it is in that case only a secondary 
metric*. A developer is primarily looking for an appropriate ontology. 
Not till then he/she can investigate further efforts into a comparison 
of available ones, if there are more than one appropriate ontology 
available.

> - lists more non-toy ontologies than abandoned PhD project prototypes.

I don't want to take a concrete position here, however, every ontology 
development has somewhere its starting point and is there usually not so 
popular. Nevertheless, the ontology design can be a good one, too. For 
that reason, why should be abandon these approach and brand them as evil?

I think, we should really investigate more power in enhancements of, 
e.g., Schemapedia. This approach seems to be a quite good one (at least 
from my personal experience). On the other side, something like 
"ontology marketing/advertisement" plays another important role. There 
are often quite good jewels out there that are badly discoverable.


Cheers,


Bob


*) I guess, the biology community wouldn't be quite satisfied when 
looking at the proposed ontology charts, or?

Received on Monday, 14 March 2011 09:16:48 UTC