- From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:48:13 +0100
- To: "Emanuele D'Arrigo" <manu3d@gmail.com>
- Cc: "OWL developers public list" <public-owl-dev@w3.org>
>>>>> "ED" == Emanuele D'Arrigo <manu3d@gmail.com> writes: ED> Hi everybody, ED> while reading the 132 pages PDF manual of BFO ED> (http://www.ifomis.uni-saarland.de/projects/bfo/manual/) I've been ED> wondering how widely used/accepted such recommendation is, as the basis ED> of any ontology. Is it a proposal, a de-facto standard, a good starting ED> point? BFO has a reasonably degree of take up within the biological ontologies. At the moment, it is not heavily used in the older ontologies which are largely the ones that people are using, but in the more recent additions. I'm not sure how you would distinguish between de-facto standard and proposal. It's not going through any formal standardisation process to my knowledge, but then this is true of most biological ontologies, and therefore many of the ontologies in use. It is being actively worked on, having a few people directly working on it, an active mailing list and feedback from people building ontologies using it (OBI in particular). Is it a good starting point? Well, it depends what you want to do. It's uses a 3D plus time view of the world. It has quite a limited scope representing "real-world" entities only; so it doesn't really support abstraction over models. It doesn't define dimensions, numbers or other such things. Finally, it's primary representation is stated to be as first order logic, rather than OWL. The OWL representation on their website is a property-less asserted hierarchy. Well, like I say, depends what you are doing. Phil
Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 14:49:05 UTC