RE: Patterns for representing mass-produced objects? (FRBR revisited)

I am not sure if it fits completely here, but i wish to show you some cases
in agricultural domain:
 
1) express in ontologies the context of something: i may decide that a
concept can be defined differently based on the context i am looking at...
(up to now i have seen only one tool that allow this, called conzilla)
 
2) express the knowledge in a way that may interest different type of
audience. E.g. I wish to show a rice ontology from the point of view of a
farmer which is interested in a timeline ontology (day0= planting,
day3=irrigating, ...., day23=harvesting, day34=polishing...)  or from the
point of view of a scientist interested maybe in pests of this crop, and
pesticides, etc.
 
3) maybe something where my "rice" concept can be considered a resource,
while in another perspective is considered a result of a process....
 
not sure this covers your needs, though....
 
Regards
Margherita
 

 -----Original Message----- 
 From: public-owl-dev-request@w3.org on behalf of Dan Brickley 
 Sent: Tue 9/30/2008 15:12 
 To: public-owl-dev@w3.org 
 Cc: Alistair Miles; Thomas Baker 
 Subject: Patterns for representing mass-produced objects? (FRBR
revisited)
 
 



 Hello, Ontology experts.
 
 I'm looking for advice on current OWL-friendly best practices for
 modelling mass-produced items and their (possibly varying)
 characteristics. The motivation here is discussions during the Dublin
 Core conference last week, and from something in the Library and
 bibliographic metadata world called FRBR - the 'Functional
Requirements
 for Bibliographic Records', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRBR
 
 A FRBR-driven perspective is slowly getting traction in the library
 world, and is important also in discussions about the future
directions
 for Dublin Core. FRBR attempts to give a better account of what kinds
of
 things Libraries describe in their bibliographic records, such that
we
 can better deal with the digital age (DVDs, "multimedia",
translations,
 versions and editions etc.). FRBR conceptualises things in terms of
 'Works', "Expressions", "Manifestations" and eventually, countable
 "Items". See the Wikipedia reference above to track down full
details.
 
 There are efforts (notably by Ian Davis of Talis, see
 http://www.frbr.org/2005/10/03/ian-davis-frbr-in-rdf) to express
these
 notions directly as RDF/OWL classes. The Library cataloguing standard
 AACR2 is currently being revised (by the Resource Description and
Access
 group, see http://www.rdaonline.org/) and taking on board FRBR ideas.
 
 I have long had a suspicion that some of the distinctions that FRBR
make
 sare more general, and deal with issues that can have common
class-based
 modelling idioms. Basically the problem of the library is that it
needs
 to keep track of countable, locatable, damage-able items, as well as
 model their shared characteristics.
 
 So a book's title, topic, authorship etc, expected number of pages,
etc
 are attached at a different level of abstraction to information about
 its location, physical state, owner, actual number of pages, and so
on.
 
 One of the problems we've seen with FRBR deployment is that, because
it
 has only these 4 "buckets" to put things in, some lack of agrement
about
 whether something is a "Work" or an "Expression". The FRBROO project
 attempts to address this by combining it into the larger CIDOC CRM
 ontology, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRBRoo . This is useful I
 think, but dauntingly large, and doesn't exploit the richness we have
in
 OWL for describing the membership rules for classes.
 
 So my thought here is that it is also worth considering an alternate
 model, in which "Work", "Expression", "Manifestation" and "Item" are
 thought of as functional requirements on our ontologising, rather
than
 as directly modelled classes.
 
 Hence my question here. How do ontologists lately tend to model
things
 like an aircraft part, or other mass-produced item, when we have a
 situation in which (a) the design of these copied itself needs
modeling
 (b) their instances may be flawed, damaged or lack adherance in
various
 ways towards their stereotypical ideal.
 
 I've been thinking that we could partially model this by some
annotation
 on the class which pointed to a description of an indicative
instance.
 For example, a T-Shirt design might typically be associated with
T-Shirt
 instances that have a certain weight, colour, and so on. I don't want
to
 make strong OWL claims that each actual shirt has just this weight,
 colour, ... any more than a library wants to imply that the actual
 number of pages in a shelved book is necessarily what we'd expect
from
 the ideal.
 
 Hope I'm making some sense here! I guess the issue I'm skirting
around
 is how to handle default reasoning in RDFS/OWL, and whether there are
 deployed patterns that work for describing typical manufactured
 instances which might be re-usable in the bibliographic world.
 
 Thanks for any thoughts / pointers.
 
 cheers,
 
 Dan
 
 ps. I made a couple of sketches in diagram / slide form, which might
 help indicate what I'm on about...
 
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/2891150205/ (static class view)
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/2892286406/in/photostream/
(timeline
 view)

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2008 20:54:36 UTC