Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

Alan, I'm glad you made that suggestion.  I was also glad to see that Tim-BL
acknowledged that the URIs are just identifiers.  As you know, noone seems
to be treating them that way, nor is there good tool support to make it easy
to do -- probably the main reason the practice persists.

Part of Martin's argument is based on what he already did, given that, maybe
he is doing the right thing now.

Moving forward for the broader semantic web community,  the more interesting
question is, if Martin was starting from scratch right now, would there
still be any good arguments for having URIs with meaningful names?

Given the RDFa context:

   - How much effort would it be, in terms of extra tool support, or
   training users etc.
   - Would it have even been possible to get GR off the ground in todays
   market place w/o meaningful URIs?


It will be interesting to see how this issue unfolds.  It is not going away
any time soon.

Michael


On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Martin Hepp <
martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> Hi Alan:
> Thanks for the suggestion. However, I am convinced that numerical IDs are
> not suited for ontologies that will mostly be used in RDFa syntax.
> Also, changing a majority of identifiers of an already established
> vocabulary would mean throwing away all of the existing momentum. There may
> be technical gains, but in terms of network economics, this would be
> suicide.
> That is no option in my case and also not needed.
>
> To keep things in perspective: GoodRelations is deployed and stable. I am
> only trying to shorten the identifier of two conceptual elements already in
> moderate use, because I think that the increased ease for writing markup and
> queries will be much bigger than the loss in terms of broken legacy systems
> or data.
>
> On the more theoretical side, I do not thing that English identifiers are
> necessarily a barrier to global adoption. HTML is based in English
> identifiers, most XML schemas are based on English identifiers, the HTTP
> protocol uses English tokens, etc. ;-)
>
> Martin
>
> On Apr 22, 2011, at 8:14 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
> > Dear Martin,
> >
> > My advise is to bite the bullet now and once and change all the URIs to
> use numerical ids, ridding them of any domain content.
> >
> > If you have the desire now to change a string you will have it again. Get
> rid of the issue now and forever while the semantic web is young.
> >
> > Aside from the issue you are facing, in my opinion choosing any
> particular language (English in this case) in a privileged position in the
> URI will be a barrier, perhaps subtle, to global adoption.
> >
> > The OBO Foundry policy is at http://obofoundry.org/id-policy.shtml  the
> in case it might be useful. You will see we decided to bite the bullet
> (because of another bad design choice) and how we are documenting it.
> >
> > -Alan
> >
> > On Apr 21, 2011, at 5:46 AM, Martin Hepp <
> martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear all:
> >>
> >> I am considering to rename a few conceptual elements in the
> GoodRelations ontology. However, they are already in use in data, queries,
> and applications. Thus, I am thinking of the least intrusive way of
> implementing this. I think this question is also relevant for many other OWL
> vocabularies on the Web.
> >>
> >> Attached, please find my proposal. It critically depends on the ability
> of typical triple-stores to compute basic(*) inferences for
> >>
> >> - owl:equivalentProperty for owl:DatatypeProperty and owl:ObjectProperty
> entities,
> >> - owl:equivalentClass for pairs of owl:Class and
> >> - owl:sameAs for pairs of "ontological" instances, e.g. value nodes
> defined in the vocabulary.
> >>
> >> With "basic", I mean that additional triples for the additional class
> membership or property or instance must be materialized; this could be a
> subset of the complete theoretical implications.
> >> As far as I know, Virtuoso does support this to a sufficient degree, but
> I am unsure about other parts of widely deployed infrastructure.
> >>
> >> It would be no problem to express the necessary inferences by means of a
> SPARQL CONSTRUCT rule or in SPIN.
> >>
> >> Please share any suggestions and concerns with me.
> >>
> >> Old, but in use:
> >> ---------------
> >> foo:LongClassName a owl:Class ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongClassName" .
> >>
> >> foo:LongPropertyName1 a owl:DatatypeProperty ;
> >>   rdfs:domain foo:LongClassName ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongPropertyName1" .
> >>
> >> foo:LongPropertyName2 a owl:ObjectProperty ;
> >>   rdfs:domain foo:LongClassName ;
> >>   rdfs:range foo:SomeOtherClass1 ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongPropertyName1" .
> >>
> >> foo:LongNameIndividual a foo:SomeOtherClass2 ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongNameIndividual" .
> >>
> >> Now, we want to rename those elements as follows, without breaking old
> data nor old queries / applications:
> >>
> >> foo:LongClassName --> foo:NewClassName
> >> foo:LongPropertyName1 --> foo:NewPropertyName1
> >> foo:LongPropertyName2 --> foo:NewPropertyName2
> >> foo:LongNameIndividual --> foo:NewNameIndividual
> >>
> >> Proposal:
> >> --------
> >> a) Step 1: Define new classes, properties, individuals and link back to
> their old variants
> >>
> >> foo:NewClassName a owl:Class ;
> >>   owl:equivalentClass foo:LongClassName .
> >>   rdfs:label "NewClassName (Note: This was foo:LongClassName
> previously)" .
> >>
> >> foo:NewPropertyName1 a owl:DatatypeProperty ;
> >>   owl:equivalentProperty foo:LongPropertyName1 ;
> >>   rdfs:domain foo:NewClassName ;
> >>   rdfs:label "NewPropertyName1 (Note: This was foo:LongPropertyName1
> previously)" .
> >>
> >> foo:NewPropertyName2 a owl:ObjectProperty ;
> >>   owl:equivalentProperty foo:LongPropertyName2 ;
> >>   rdfs:domain foo:NewClassName ;
> >>   rdfs:range foo:SomeOtherClass1 ;
> >>   rdfs:label "NewPropertyName2 (Note: This was foo:LongPropertyName2
> previously)" .
> >>
> >> foo:NewNameIndividual a foo:SomeOtherClass2 ;
> >>   owl:sameAs foo:LongNameIndividual ;
> >>   rdfs:label "NewNameIndividual (Note: This was foo:LongNameIndividual
> previously)" .
> >>
> >> b) Step 2: Deprecate the old elements in OWL 2 style (using
> owl:deprecated)
> >> foo:LongClassName a owl:Class;
> >>   owl:deprecated true;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongClassName - Deprecated, use foo:NewClassName instead"
> .
> >>
> >> foo:LongPropertyName1 a owl:DatatypeProperty ;
> >>   owl:deprecated true;
> >>   rdfs:domain foo:LongClassName ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongPropertyName1 - Deprecated, use foo:NewPropertyName1
> instead" .
> >>
> >> foo:LongPropertyName2 a owl:ObjectProperty ;
> >>   owl:deprecated true ;
> >>   rdfs:domain foo:LongClassName ;
> >>   rdfs:range foo:SomeOtherClass1 ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongPropertyName1 - Deprecated, use foo:NewPropertyName2
> instead" .
> >>
> >> foo:LongNameIndividual a foo:SomeOtherClass2 ;
> >>   owl:deprecated true ;
> >>   rdfs:label "LongNameIndividual - Deprecated, use foo:NewNameIndividual
> instead" .
> >>
> >> c) Since the owl:deprecated property is not defined in OWL1, I would
> also add the following axiom in order to remain within OWL 1 DL:
> >> #OWL 1 DL compatibility of the OWL2 deprecated property
> >> owl:deprecated a owl:AnnotationProperty.
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance!
> >>
> >> Best
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> >> --------------------------------------------------------
> >> martin hepp
> >> e-business & web science research group
> >> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
> >>
> >> e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> >> phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> >> fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> >> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
> >>        http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> >> skype:   mfhepp
> >> twitter: mfhepp
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>


-- 
Michael Uschold, PhD
   Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
   LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu
   Skype, Twitter: UscholdM