Re: Official OWL version outdated

On 5/7/13 9:22 PM, Holger Knublauch wrote:
> On 5/8/2013 10:44, Dan Brickley wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wednesday, May 8, 2013, Holger Knublauch wrote:
>>
>>     Looking at the OWL version of schema.org <http://schema.org> at
>>
>>     http://schema.org/docs/schemaorg.owl
>>
>>     I notice that this seems to be a rather old version, while the
>>     RDFa version
>>
>>     http://schema.org/docs/schema_org_rdfa.html
>>
>>     seems to be more recent. (When) will the OWL version be fixed?
>>
>>
>> Is it useful? what do you prefer? The use of OWL is pretty weak since 
>> we're so flexible.
>
> It's not very useful in its current form, yet I believe it can be made 
> very useful with a few changes. You guys are probably wasting an 
> opportunity to get more "semantic web" people on board. My guess is 
> that most OWL people look at both prominent online versions (the 
> official one and the one of rdfs.org) and walk away because they are 
> rather unusable.
>
> Specifically, I would do the following transformations (and as an 
> exercise I have actually implemented the required SPARQL updates based 
> on the current OWL file):
>
> - Clean up the owl:unionOfs with one member
> - Convert any usage of schema.org datatypes with xsd ones
> - Convert rdfs:range (Number or String) to xsd:float
>
> Along with a simple instance data converter, the ontology could be 
> changed to
> - Replace schema:Thing with owl:Thing
> - Replace schema:name with rdfs:label
> - Replace schema:description with rdfs:comment
> - Delete schema:url (as it's basically the URI of the subject)
>
> Manual clean up should
> - Add cardinality restrictions
> - Declare owl:inverseOf relationships
> - Mark outdated properties (such as the plural forms) as owl:deprecated.
>
> Could this info be made available anywhere in machine readable form? I 
> am pretty sure not only the RDF/OWL mapping could use this info.
>
>>
>> Does rdf/xml vs rdfa (or json-ld etc) matter to you? What about the 
>> choice of all in one big file vs per-term?
>
> It would be good to be able to owl:import something. The RDFa version 
> does some things better than the OWL version, but not everything is 
> perfect: properties with multiple rdfs:domains should use owl:unionOf 
> (I guess RDFa has trouble representing this?).
>
> And of course why not have the URIs dereferencable as true linked 
> data... This should be a trivial feature to add for an organization 
> that large. Even if just to show that the people behind schema.org do 
> care about the semantic web community.
>
> I am tempted to create our own copy based on the distilled RDFa 
> version on some topbraid.org address because I believe there is much 
> more potential here. 

Yes, there is and I encourage you to crack on if you have the time. 
Basically, make your tweak and then just publish the revised document at 
URL.

> One specific use case is that many of our customers build their own 
> ontologies with concepts that are reinvented all the time - Person, 
> Address etc. While our tooling is generic and can work with any 
> ontology, it would be better to ship our product with some starter 
> ontology and I believe schema.org could become the foundation of this. 
> For this starter ontology, we would define some customized forms and 
> views, e.g. so that addresses show street address above postal code 
> etc. We could also define some out of the box web services with 
> typical queries, reports etc. Clearly there are other product ideas in 
> this space that the schema.org effort could also benefit of. The more 
> alignment of data the better for everyone. Even if RDFa and Microdata 
> will remain the vehicles of distributing schema.org instance data, 
> these web pages may be generated by a triple store.

Not may, they will, and have been :-)

>
> Sorry if this is repeating some discussions that have already happened 
> elsewhere... I am trying to catch up.
>
> HTH
> Holger
>


-- 

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Kingsley Idehen 
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