RE: [BIONT] Teleconference

> Discuss Alan Ruttenberg's use cases for BIORDF and identify relevant artifacts
(thesauri, ontologies, mappings,   

 >  etc.). 

 

Which use case you meant?  Or did I miss something?

 

[VK] The use cases I meant were created by Alan Ruttenberg and are available at
the following locations on the HCLSIG Wiki

       Let us know if you have any problems accessing them

 

http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/OMIM_Neural_diseases

http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/Brain_Atlas_condition_to_sc
ans


 >  Brainstorm pragmatic and engineering definitions of ontologies in the
context of the use cases identified above .

 

I started contemplating this question and it seems not as clearly as I think it
would be.   If we give it a strict definition that an ontology is an RDF model
with an <owl:Ontology> header, the Dublin Core wouldn't be an Ontology because
"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" doesn't have an <owl:Ontology> header.  The
ontology header appears to serve mostly for annotation purpose.  Although the
range of "owl:imports" is constrained to owl:Ontology, but it is not clear from
W3C's spec as what if the URI of an owl:imports is not an owl:Ontology.  If an
ontology can owl:imports an "ontology" like DC without being labeled as some
kind of error.  It implies that everything in RDF can be considered as an
ontology.  Although this definition is at first seemingly absurd, there isn't a
strong argument (at least I can not find one) to rule against it. It appears to
me, intuitively, that an ontology is only an ontology when it is used by
someonelse.  This relativeness seems in line with its "conceptual" definition
like - a spec of conceptualization.  In other words, some assertion only becomes
an ontology when its conceptualization is adopted by others.  But, how can we
define it clearly in the engineer sense? Anyone has any ideas?

 

[VK] Will it be easier if you are able to look at the cases and simply enumerate
the examples of thesauri, ontologies, information models, schemas that could be
applicable for that use case?

       At this stage, it may not be a good idea to get caught up in formatting
and other details of whether something is an owl ontology or not...
      Anyway, we could discuss these issues further in our teleconference
tomorrow.

 

Cheers,

 

---Vipul