Re: ssn "not machine readable"

Hi Krzysztof,


I am sure you have very good reasons to use global restrictions. If you could send me some links, I will be happy to read the good things about global restrictions and how it could be parsed using (python) libraries, such as rdflib. The title of e-mail is a rather strong argument and doesn’t completely reflect what I meant. The core problem with ontologies is once they are developed, people tend to look at the ontology structure with their eyes and use their own codes instead the real ontology structure to annotate their data. Due to human error, we end up having a big messy ill-defined annotated linked data. I have stated this issue with SSN validator (http://iot3.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSNValidation/) as well as SAOPY library (http://iot.ee.surrey.ac.uk/citypulse/ontologies/sao/saopy.html), where a user can either validate its data or prevent having syntax errors during the annotation process. However, during my investigation and development, I faced with lots of difficulty to parse and extract the structure of the SSN ontology including object properties and their links to concepts.

I hope this e-mail clarifies what are the possible problems if the SSN ontology is being mapped (e.g. annotation libraries) or guarded (e.g. validation tools) by machines.

Cheers,

Sefki Kolozali
Research Fellow
Institute for Communication Systems (ICS), home of the 5G Innovation Centre
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1483 689490

E-mail: s.kolozali@s<mailto:s.kolozali@qmul.ac.uk>urrey.ac.uk<http://urrey.ac.uk>
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ics/<http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ccsr/>






On 17 May 2016, at 23:53, Krzysztof Janowicz <janowicz@ucsb.edu<mailto:janowicz@ucsb.edu>> wrote:

Hi,

I do not understand how the lack of global domain and range restrictions make SSN not machine readable. Also, there are many good reasons not to include global range and domain restrictions (and for adding guarded restrictions instead).

Best,
Krzysztof

On 05/17/2016 03:39 PM, s.kolozali@surrey.ac.uk<mailto:s.kolozali@surrey.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi Kerry,

    This was a problem that I had faced when I had to parse and map the SSN ontology (along with a many other ontologies) into SAOPY library that I have developed (<http://iot.ee.surrey.ac.uk/citypulse/ontologies/sao/saopy.html>http://iot.ee.surrey.ac.uk/citypulse/ontologies/sao/saopy.html). What I observed back then was the SSN ontology was missing all the domain and range restrictions for object properties. I had stated this problem to you in an e-mail and you had told me that it was simply due to the fact that "SSN ontology is using global restrictions instead of local restrictions". To solve this issue, I had to add all the domain and range restrictions of object properties one by one by going through and reading the comments in the SSN ontology. I am happy to send my local SSN copy to you "if you are interested in", which can save you a lot of time.

An excerpt the SSN ontology:
    <!-- http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn#detects -->

    <owl:ObjectProperty rdf:about="&ssn;detects">
        <rdfs:label>detects</rdfs:label>
        <rdfs:seeAlso>http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/SSN_Skeleton#Skeleton</rdfs:seeAlso>
        <rdfs:comment>A relation from a sensor to the Stimulus that the sensor can detect.
The Stimulus itself will be serving as a proxy for (see isProxyOf) some observable property.</rdfs:comment>
        <rdfs:isDefinedBy>http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn</rdfs:isDefinedBy>
    </owl:ObjectProperty>


An excerpt from my local copy of the SSN ontology:
    <!-- http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn#detects -->

    <owl:ObjectProperty rdf:about="&ssn;detects">
        <rdfs:label>detects</rdfs:label>
        <rdfs:seeAlso>http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/SSN_Skeleton#Skeleton</rdfs:seeAlso>
        <rdfs:comment>A relation from a sensor to the Stimulus that the sensor can detect.
The Stimulus itself will be serving as a proxy for (see isProxyOf) some observable property.</rdfs:comment>
        <rdfs:isDefinedBy>http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn</rdfs:isDefinedBy>
        <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="&ssn;Sensor"/>
        <rdfs:range rdf:resource="&ssn;SensorInput"/>
        <rdfs:range rdf:resource="&ssn;Stimulus"/>
    </owl:ObjectProperty>

Although it sounds like a fairly simple and straight forward issue, it causes lots of issues when one attempts to parse and use the SSN ontology in an automated way. The text written in the form of rdfs:comments are helpful for people but local restrictions are more helpful for machine interpretation.

Cheers,

Sefki Kolozali
Research Fellow
Institute for Communication Systems (ICS), home of the 5G Innovation Centre
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1483 689490

E-mail: s.kolozali@s<mailto:s.kolozali@qmul.ac.uk>urrey.ac.uk<http://urrey.ac.uk/>
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ics/<http://www.surrey.ac.uk/ccsr/>






On 17 May 2016, at 23:11, Kerry Taylor <<mailto:kerry.taylor@anu.edu.au>kerry.taylor@anu.edu.au<mailto:kerry.taylor@anu.edu.au>> wrote:

Hi Sefki,

Can you please explain further what you meant about failure of  “machine readability” with ssn as raised in the meeting today? Before that, can you do your test with this ssn herehttps://www.w3.org/ns/ssn/  as it seems likely to me that dul could have been the source of trouble and this is the new  (FPWD) version with dul removed.

Kerry




--
Krzysztof Janowicz

Geography Department, University of California, Santa Barbara
4830 Ellison Hall, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060

Email: jano@geog.ucsb.edu<mailto:jano@geog.ucsb.edu>
Webpage: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~jano/

Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net<http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/>