RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

> To be honest, I think that this is a recipe of despair; I don't think
> that there is any one thing that SW enables you do to that could not
> do in another way. It's a question of whether you can do things more
> conveniently, or with more commonality than other wise; after all, XML
> is just an extensible syntax and, indeed, could do exactly nothing
> that SGML could not do (when it came out -- XML standards exceed SGML
> ones now). XML has still been successful.
[VK] I think Anita and you are not actually in disagreement. The SW community
together needs to concretely define and measure:
- "how much more conveniently (at a lower cost?) can things be done in
comparison to other technologies"
- "how much commonality can be invoked using SW technologies"

IMHO, if the answer to the above questions is not yes, then we are just doing SW
for intellectual entertainment.

> It's more a question of whether, RDF or OWL provides a combination of
> things that we would not get otherwise. With OWL (DL and lite), I
> rather like the ability to check my model with a reasoner, and to be
> able to apply the ontology automatically in some circumstances. With
> RDF, you have a convenient technology for building a hyperlinked
> resource, but with added link types.

[VK] But how useful are thee artifacts? Do they result in improving the
performance/quality of certain things or do they help doing things more
conveniently?

> Of course, you could do the latter with straight XML (well, since RDF
> is XML, you are doing so). And the former could be done without OWL,
> just with a raw DL; of course, then you wouldn't get some of the
> additional features of OWL (such as multi-lingual support which
> derives directly from the XML).

[VK] Are these features really important and useful? Does multi-lingual support
help alleviate or solve existing problems? Are there any studies which
conclusively demonstrate this?

> Having said all that went before, I agree with this; having a set of
> RDF/OWL life sciences success stories which explained why the
> technology was appropriate (if not uniquely appropriate) would be a
> good thing, if it has not been done before.

[VK] Exactly! See! I said we are actually in agreement!

---Vipul

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2006 11:17:57 UTC