RE: [BIONT] Teleconference 22nd August, 2006 - All times are US Eastern!

Matthias,

I am glad you are raising these issues.
We need to broaden the F2F task to RDF(S) vs XML(S) vs OWL

In the meanwhile, is it possible for you to post use cases to the Ontology Task
Force wiki, that in your experience, illustrates the issues below?

Regards,

---Vipul

> I wonder what it is that makes people choose between RDFS or OWL. It seems
> that people seem to think that RDFS is of better use for more technical,
> 'sloppy' representation of data, while OWL is of better use for more
> ontological, concise representation of information. This might have some
> advantage, as it would allow us to separate these two different grades of
> ontological consistency. So when we are seeing an ontology formulated in
> RDFS we expect less ontological commitment than we do with an ontology
> formulated with RDFS. However, I am not sure if such a separation does
> really exist (there are quite sloppy OWL ontologies and pretty clean RDF
> schemas).
> 
> I do not see many reasons for using RDFS instead of OWL lite or OWL DL
> when creating new ontologies. First of all, merging an RDFS ontology with
> an OWL lite/DL ontology always results in an ontology that is OWL Full --
> something that most developers of OWL ontologies want to avoid. A little
> bit of RDFS in a large ontology that otherwise is valid OWL DL will turn
> the whole ontology into OWL Full.
> Therefore I would suggest that every new ontology should be developed as
> OWL lite or OWL DL where possible. Even if we do not want to use
> reasoning, OWL lite and DL have the advantage that they are less complex
> than OWL Full and less prone to inconsistencies than RDFS -- and they do
> not ruin other OWL lite/DL ontologies when they are merged.
> 
> kind regards,
> Matthias Samwald
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 22 August 2006 11:51:30 UTC