FW: Wordnet draft review

 Resending as again my mail seems to have been dropped somewhere.

Brian


-----Original Message-----
From: McBride, Brian 
Sent: 26 November 2005 18:25
To: 'public-swbp-wg-request@w3.org'
Subject: Wordnet draft review

I have reviewed the document at
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark/wn/wn-conversion.html - and I shouldn't have -
I should have review the one in W3C space, which is
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/WNET/wn-conversion.html, but I
presume they are identical.

I have attached an editted version with inline comments in colour.

My overall observation, and concern, is that this document describes a
conversion process rather than describing the results of that process
and how they might be used.  It is programmer documentation rather than
user documentation.

To put it bluntly, this is the wrong note.

I have raised this point before, and I did accept the decision at the
f2f to review this document with the aim of publishing it knowing that
aspect of its nature.  Having reviewed it however, I am once again
concerned.

Is it appropriate to publish an ontology (in this case the lexical model
for wordnet expressed in rdf/owl) without the supporting documentation
that enables the reader to interpret it readily and accurately?  I am
not clear on what is normal practicer here, but I would expect it to be
that a published ontology SHOULD be accompanied by appropriate user
documentation making it easier for the user to understand the ontology
and clarifying, where necessary, the contract that the ontology honours.
An example is clarifying the contract around synset ids.

I would like to see a commitment to transform the current document into
the appropriate user documentation I envisage, to add a note to that
effect to the current document and then to publish it as an indicator of
progress and intent.

Brian