- From: wangxiao <wangxiao@musc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 12:58:13 -0400
- To: <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
- Robert Stevens, > My point of substance was about modularisation. I hope that > someone will show me how to do it in OWL, after telling me > what the behaviour of a module is. I have came up to this idea. Please see http://www.charlestoncore.org/ont/2005/08/o3.html , the ontology's namespace URI is http://www.charlestoncore.org/ontology/2005/08/o3#. In short, a Profile is an ontology that only handles the merging of ontologies but do not create concepts under its own namespace. All ontologies shall be deployed as a local ontology, i.e, ontologies without using foreign concepts. And complext ontologies, i.e., those import foreign concepts should be normalized into local ontologies and profile. Such a separation will increase ontology reuse and system's robustness because all ontology is disjoint from each other. In addition, it maximize overall system expressiveness. Now, ontology creator shall try to develop ontology without thinking how it relates to others. On the other hand, using o3:Profile allows all ontologies be combined according to a users' viewpoint or an application profile. The separation, IMHO, is very important. And this is a concrete engineer principle that everyone can follow without subjective debate. Of course, how to partition content (not the engineer artifacts) into local ontologies is subjective. Detailed ontology needs a top ontology to help them. For instance, if when MGED is designed with a top experimental ontology in mind (something like BOSS. http://www.charlestoncore.org/ontology/boss#), content decomposition will be easier. If an ontology developer doesn't know what the system is supposed to run and what it can possibly achieve, how can they do things right. To help them "comprehend" is much more important than let them simply "know". Xiaoshu
Received on Wednesday, 12 October 2005 17:00:11 UTC