Re: [VM] Scoping Draft with questions to TF members $swbpd

Just a comment, as I see it there are two options:

(1) Generating an OWL ontology from a thesaurus.

(2) Generating an RDF description of a thesaurus.

(1) May often (although not always) be desirable.  However, class/instance 
semantics are almost always implicit in a thesaurus (and can be inappropriate) 
=> (1) usually requires significant manual labour.

(2) Means using an RDF vocabulary that accurately expresses the explicit (and 
potentially fuzzy) semantics of a thesaurus (and hence can be AUTOMATICALLY 
captured from an existing serialisation of a thesaurus).

I think (2) is the first goal, enabling us to generate lots of RDF thesauri very 
cheaply.  Also N.B. there are many scenarios in which RDF based applications 
working on this type of data can provide important services and facilities to 
thesaurus users that are currently unavailable or expensive to produce.  (I.e. 
thesaurus user community will get alot out of (2)).

(1) Can be explored for various thesauri, weighing the cost of converting to OWL 
ontology against the potential utility.  I expect that the outcome will differ 
from case to case, and will depend largely on the precise intended use of the 
thesaurus.



Al.





Dan Brickley wrote:
> * Thomas Baker <thomas.baker@bi.fhg.de> [2004-09-10 10:13+0200]
> 
>>On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 12:44:36PM -0700, Uschold, Michael F wrote:
>>
>>>As I understand it, your point is that OWL should be used
>>>"out of the box" to represent a thesaurus language directly --
>>>rather than using OWL first to represent some ad-hoc language
>>>of thesaurus relations and then, in turn, using that ad-hoc
>>>language to represent the thesaurus.
>>>
>>>[MFU] NO NO!  I'm remaining agnoistic. The matter needs looking into.
>>>There may be benefits either way. Or there may be clear preferred
>>>choice. 
>>
>>Mike,
>>
>>Have I correctly understood that you mean to say:
>>
>>    There are two alternative ways one might use OWL to
>>    express a thesaurus: One could use native OWL constructs to
>>    represent thesaurus relations.  Or one could use OWL first
>>    to represent a language of thesaurus relations and then use
>>    that relation language to represent the thesaurus itself.
>>
>>If so, I'm thinking the VM Note might state the issue, present
>>a few arguments each way, and point off to any available
>>sources of emerging solutions.  Does that sound reasonable?
> 
> 
> The SKOS work is one such approach. It uses RDF (and bits of OWL I
> think) to describe relations like 'broader' that map to the way 
> thesaurus-style systems describe the world. Re-modelling a thesaurus as
> an ontology is a seriously expensive and challenging effort; it'd be
> good to have better  docs to assist those who attempt this, but more
> important is to make sure our enthusiasm for OWL modelling doesn't obscure the 
> potential value of thesauri-in-RDF approaches...
> 
> Maybe Alistair can comment further?
> 
> Dan
> 

-- 
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
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Email: a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
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