RE: Tools

 
 
I've seen a number of largish ontologies generated
by hand in OWL (and originally DAML+OIL). The problem
is one of syntax. The XML representation of OWL is 
fairly long winded and hard to read. I'm less than 
convinced that it's appropriate for (editing) a large ontology. 
 
I understand your point about OO style ontologies. I've
seen this also (probably been guility of it as well). 
But getting people to write long hand ontologies seems
a less good option than writing tutorials and providing
good examples of non OO style ontologies!
 
Perhaps if there were a simpler, more human writable
syntax, this might be easier, but as it stands writing
by hand doesn't seem a great thing to me.
 
Of course, editors have always been a religious 
issue! I'd be surprised if ontology developers shared
any more consensus on this issue than programmers
do on IDE's. 
 
Cheers
 
Phil
 
 
 

________________________________

From: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org on behalf of wangxiao
Sent: Fri 14/10/2005 18:52
To: 'public-semweb-lifesci'
Subject: RE: Tools




-Eric,

> Helen's point is a very good one.
>
> At the risk of stating what may or may not be obvious to all,
> there are several *general* tools that are focused on helping
> people create ontologies that may be useful.  In no
> particular order ...

Here is my two cents on the topics.

I actually hold a bit different opinion on this.  I think at the beginning
stage, one should try to do hand editing.  I played around with Protégé
before, I think because of historic reasons, it uses a lot of terms in
semantic network.  I saw a lot of people discussing ontologies using "slot",
"roles", etc. I don't have any grudge on protégé, which I think is a great
software.  But this sort of dialect is not healthy to advance SW
technologies. And I also that see many ontologies are developed with an OO
thinking. Doing it manually actually helps to understand the technology, at
least that is my experience.  But of course, tool is useful to speed things
up but only when people knows what the tool are doing for them.

Xiaoshu

Received on Sunday, 16 October 2005 20:02:23 UTC