RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

 

I also think the use case for bringing the thesaurus to the Web goes beyond the
OWL stuff Vipal describes.  Essentially, by moving to RDFS (SKOS) you get an
advantage different than reasoning - the terms in your thesaurus become URIs
that other people can point to.  It means that they can use your terminologies
in their applications, and links back to your terms can be maintained (rather
than "reverse engineered" by a search engine).  Tools people are playing with
for SKOS (and OWL) include image annotation, text/blog indexing, and database
indexing/linking - and in those cases, the ability to link to things outside the
ontology space are crucial (for example, imagine a lot of bloggers in the life
science area using your terms as the things they subscribe to via RSS - or
imagine being able to link your content to, for example, Nature's, by having
mappings between synonyms in each others' thesauri, with live links to the
content).

 

[VK] I agree with Jim that these would enable reuse of thesauri concepts in a
more significant way than otherwise.

       However, as Jim himself points out, the use case is that of bringing the
thesaurus to the Web

 

      What would be interesting would be to bring the thesaurus to the Semantic
Web, that is make explicit the semantic

      structures in the thesaurus and exploiting them using SW technologies. The
catch of course is that it requires

      significant upfront investment.