Re: doubt about "Synset / Concept" class

Hi John,

> Firstly, we should bear in mind that SKOS is not an ontology:

Well, ontologies are resources representing the conceptual model
underlying a certain domain, describing it in a declarative fashion
cleaningly separated from procedural aspects [1]. In that sense, and
also in Grubber's traditional definition [2], SKOS models can be
considered ontologies. Although, of course, they are not "formal"
ontologies (the spectrum of formality is wide, as in Lassila's
classification [3]).

> As such, we have two ways to go as a group. We could be in the very
> prescriptivist camp of saying "SKOS models are not ontologies, we should
> explicitly tell people they have to link to SKOS models differently".
> Alternatively, we could be in the permissive camp "Many people use SKOS as
> ontologies, we should accommodate this... (and SKOS is close enough to
> ontologies that the difference does not really matter)". This is therefore
> just a question of documentation, and perhaps the best solution is to say
> nothing at all (the prescriptivists aren't upset and the permissivists are
> not disallowed).

Yes, I agree that is the best option (avoid commitments to any view),
although we still have to decide which domain/ranges will have our
ontology-lexicon mapping properties (so some commitments made).

> Stated equivalence between symbols, e.g., (onto:SamuelClemens owl:sameAs onto:MarkTwain)
> Inferred equivalence between symbols, e.g., (onto:Yeti ≡ ⊥ ∏ GreatestNaturalNumber ≡ ⊥ ⊨Yeti ≡ GreatestNaturalNumber)

I am not sure if you can entail that two concepts are the same if they
share the same (empty) set of instances.

Regards,
Jorge

----


[1] Philipp Cimiano. Ontology learning and population from text:
Algorithms, evaluation and applications. Springer, October 2006
[2] Thomas R. Gruber. Toward principles for the design of ontologies
used for knowledge sharing. International Journal Human Computer
Studies, vol. 43, pages 907-928, November 1995.
[3] Ora Lassila & Deborah L. McGuinness. The Role of Frame-Based
Representation on the Semantic Web. Technical report, Knowledge
Systems Laboratory Stanford University, KSL-01-02, 2001

Received on Friday, 10 May 2013 11:15:51 UTC