RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

At 22:12 -0500 3/30/06, Kashyap, Vipul wrote:

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.

Vipul obviously means something different by "Semantic Web" than I do 
-- but what do I know?

I think RDFS and RDFS+a few OWL constructs are as much (if not more) 
Semantic Web than a standalone ontology even if it is in OWL...
  THat said, the benefit of having vocabularies in SKOS, and using the 
linking of the Semantic Web is that then richer models (in OWL) can 
be tied to terms in the ontology, and that will provide a lot of new 
functionality...  but the key is that ontologies published on the 
Semantic Web (i.e. in RDF so that there is a URI for each term) have 
a lot of power as yet unexplored, and provide a way to incrementally 
add the power of OWL, without having to take the whole thing into OWL 
in one fell swoop (if you'll pardon the pun).  A thesaurus of the 
size of the one that Anita describes would be very expensive to port 
to OWL in one shot - but the port to SKOS is easy, and then in the 
same, or different, document richer semantics can be added - and that 
is new to KR, since incrementality of this kind (via multiple rich 
subsets linked to a a single thesaurus) has not been explored in the 
traditional KR&R space, certainly not "in the wild" where search 
engines and the like can also b involved... but then, I guess I have 
a vision for this stuff that isn't quite the same as many people's 
these days -- my blog entry at [1] is a short description of some of 
this...
  -Jim H.
p.s. end of spiel, this isn't the place to argue visions...  this 
started with some practical advice about thesauri, which is what I 
was aiming at...



[1] https://www.mindswap.org/blog/2006/01/26/thnking-about-the-semantic-web/
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