[OEP] public comment

Dear All,

(Apologies in advance for the potential misuse of the mailing for
providing public comment. I'm not a member of the WG, but I failed to
locate a public comment mailing list.)

I have read the Classes as Values note (version 3, by Natasha Noy) with
great interest as the representation issue of 'annotation with subjects'
have been a topic of discussion in several projects I was involved in. 

In every case, the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches
have been discussed and then a decision was made for one or the other.
For example, in the EU FP5 project On-To-Knowledge we settled for
Approach 2, except that we used our own property called isAbout (instead
of dc:subject) and added the rule that

(Doc, isAbout, A) and (A, rdfs:subClassOf, B) -> (Doc, isAbout, B)

which provided the missing piece of inference (not expressible in OWL
DL, as rightly noted in the document).

Despite that the note is a clear and important summary of these
discussions and is, for example, already read with interest by members
of the EU FP6 SEKT project, I personally have the feeling that merely
listing the various approaches that one can take does not go far enough
when it comes to the Semantic Web. 

Within a project or in a closed community one may choose any
representation that he sees fit as long as it's agreed, but the case of
the Semantic Web is somewhat different. I suggest that this group should
consider what happens if we allow people to choose from these options at
will and annotate their content correspondingly. If I let my crawler out
on the Semantic Web, how is it going to figure out on the first place
which approach is being used? (Especially with the multiple
interpretations given to dc:subject...) Is it still possible then to
integrate metadata created with the different approaches? What are the
translation rules for that?

In summary, I have the feeling that the level of commitment this
document represents is still too low to build an interoperable Semantic
Web of content and annotations. My suggestion to the group is to either
(1) limit the choices further or (2) to describe the ways to identify
the various approaches and how to make them interoperable (translate
them to one another) with minimal loss of semantics.

Best,

Peter

-----------------------------
Peter Mika M.Sc.
Free University Amsterdam (VUA)
Faculty of Sciences
Business Informatics Section
De Boelelaan 1081a
1081HV, Amsterdam
Tel.: +31 20 4447452
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika
-----------------------------

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2004 08:11:04 UTC