Re: Help with modeling my ontology

Just on the question of representing measurements then one approach to 
that is the RDF Data Cube vocabulary [1]. In that each observation has a 
measure (the thing you are measuring, such as canopyHeight), the 
dimensions of where/when/etc the measurement applies to and the 
attributes that allow you to interpret the measurement.

So you would normally make the unit of measure an attribute.

If the method doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the thing you 
are measuring then you could make that another attribute.  If it does 
then you should have a different measure property for the different 
methods (possibly with some common super property).

Dave

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube/

On 27/02/13 20:58, Luca Matteis wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> At http://www.cropontology.org/ I'm trying to make things a little more
> RDF friendly. For example, we have an ontology about Groundnut here:
> http://www.cropontology.org/ontology/CO_337/Groundnut/ttl
>
> I'm generating this from a somewhat flat list of names/concepts, so it's
> still a work in progress. But I'm having issues making sense of it all
> so that the ontology can be used by people that actually have Groundnut
> data.
>
> For example, in that Turtle dump, search for "Canopy height". This is a
> concept that people might use to describe the height of the canopy of
> their groundnut plant, as the comment describes (this should be a
> Property not a Class, but like I said, it's still work-in-progress).
> Let's try with some sample data someone might have about groundnut, and
> see if I can further explain my issue (I assume co: is a prefix for my
> cropontology.org <http://cropontology.org> site, also the URIs are
> different but it's just an example):
>
>      :groundnut1
>        a co:Groundnut;
>        co:canopyHeight xxx .
>
> Ok here's the issue, we know that `canopyHeight` is measured using
> different methodologies. For example it might be measured using a
> methodology that we found to be described as "Measuring the distance
> from the base to the tip of the main stem", but it might also be some
> other method. And, funny enough, we also realized that it is measured
> using centimeters, with a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 10cm.
>
> So how should I make this easier on the people that are using my
> ontology? Should it be:
>
>      :groundnut1
>        a co:Groundnut;
>        co:canopyHeight "9.5cm" .
>
> or should it be:
>
>      :groundnut1
>        a co:Groundnut;
>        co:canopyHeight [
>          co:method "Measuring the distance from the base to the tip of
> the main stem";
>          co:scale "9.5cm"
>        ] .
>
> Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way and should think more about how
> this ontology is going to be used by people that have data about it...
> but I'm not sure. Any advice would be great. And here's the actual
> browsable list of concepts, in a tree sort of interface:
> http://www.cropontology.org/terms/CO_337:0000039/
>
> As you can see there's this kind of thing happening all over the
> ontology where we have the Property->the method it was measured-> and
> finally the scale. Any help? Thanks!
>

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2013 08:50:08 UTC