RE: Antwort: RE: Semantic web article in Nature Biotechnology

wangxiao wrote:
> - 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. 


How does this work with properties. You suggest, for example, that 
"complex ontologies should be avoided"--a complex ontology being
something that references other ontologies. 

If we take a biological example, OBO is currently coming up 
with a core Relationship Ontology. Now they use a different 
formalism from semantic web "proper", but, to me, having a core 
set of vocabularies describing is a positive thing. 

It also appears to me that if you consider the formal semantics
of OWL if any two ontologies use the same relationships (from a 
third ontology) then you may well be able to infer relationships
between concepts in the two ontologies that even if they do not
directly reference each other. 

I think Robert also has a deeper point about modularisation. We
need to be able to split ontologies up. But we don't have the tools 
and language support that most programming languauges offer. Should
an ontology not be able to declare a "public" interface, as with 
many programming languages? 

Phil

Received on Thursday, 13 October 2005 09:44:53 UTC