Ontology metadata

Congratulations on a great first draft for the Requirements for a Web
Ontology Language. Your statement of requirements is extremely
comprehensive.

One of the few areas in which an improvement is to be desired relates to:

Ontology metadata
It must be possible to provide meta-data for each ontology, such as author,
publish-date, etc. The language should provide a standard set of common
metadata properties. These properties may or may not be borrowed from the
Dublin Core element set.

It should be possible to identify the author and update date of an
individual term within an ontology. Ontologies are rarely the work of a
single person, and rarely created at a single point in time. You need to be
able to identify which changes have been applied in each version. This can
only be done if individual terms carry enough information as to their
currency.

I would also suggest you review the suggestion, under View Mechanism, that:
"This is particularly useful in developing multicultural versions of an
ontology. Note that this requirement may be satisfied by having multiple
ontologies and using an ontology mapping mechanism."
This is certainly not the most efficient way to identify relationships
between different sets of terms in multilingual ontologies. There are severe
problems with ensuring the update of parallel ontologies when they are
maintained separately.

Martin Bryan
The SGML Centre, 29 Oldbury Orchard, Churchdown, Glos GL3 2PU, UK
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029  E-mail: mtbryan@sgml.u-net.com

For further details about The SGML Centre visit http://www.sgml.u-net.com

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2002 05:42:34 UTC