Re: concern about the definition of ontology in the ontology document

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I like Veronique's suggestion!



regards,

John


--- Original Message ---


From : 
"Veronique Malaise"<vmalaise@few.vu.nl>


To : 
<public-media-annotation@w3.org>


Date : 
2010/05/18 Tuesday PM 8:53:43


Subject : 
concern about the definition of ontology in the ontology document



Dear all, 



I think that readers of the ontology document 

http://dev.w3.org/2008/video/mediaann/mediaont-1.0/mediaont-1.0.html 

might have some troubles making the link between the (very correct) 

definition of what an ontology is, in section 2, and the proposal of 

the group (a list of properties defined in prose, not in a formal 

language). The text of the ontology document is copied below, followed 

by a line I propose to add to make the link clearer. What do you think? 



Best regards, 

V?ronique 



"An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared, machine- 

readable vocabulary and meanings, in the form of various entities and 

relationships between them, to describe knowledge about the contents 

of one or more related subject domains throughout the life cycle of 

its existence. These entities and relationships are used to represent 

knowledge in the set of related subject domains. Formal refers to the 

fact that the ontology should be representable in a formal grammar. 

Explicit means that the entities and relationships used, and the 

constraints on their use, are precisely and unambiguously defined in a 

declarative language suitable for knowledge representation. Shared 

means that all users of an ontology will represent a concept using the 

same or equivalent set of entities and relationships. Subject domain 

refers to the content of the universe of discourse being represented 

by the ontology" 



I propose to add something like: 

"In this recommendation, the vocabulary in question is the list of 

core properties (relationships) defined in the ma namespace, and the 

machine-readable format is not specified here: the recommendation 

provides a simple text description and definition of the 

relationships. An implementation of the vocabulary in RDF [1] has been 

developed in the MAWG RDF? task force [2]. Implementations in 

different formats are nevertheless allowed. 



[1] http://www.w3.org/RDF/ 

[2]ref to the URL of the document of the modeling task force