- From: John Graybeal <graybeal@mbari.org>
- Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:54:54 -0600
- To: Simon Cox <simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu>
- Cc: <Laurent.Lefort@csiro.au>, <public-xg-ssn@w3.org>
I believe I have seen in many places that if you want your ontology to be re-used, it is best that it be "modular", which I understood to mean self-contained. If it has many references to the rest of the web, then its complexity is higher, and its likely usability becomes lower (because somewhere in those references will be a statement that conflicts with statements in the user's world -- whether or not they "need" to use those statements). If my (admittedly naive) understanding is correct, this is essentially a case of conflicting design architectures -- one has lots of little atomic plug-in pieces, and another has deep and rich connections to components with sophisticated capabilities or relationships. Both have value, but for most applied uses I would suspect the former architecture is easier to reuse. I welcome enlightenment. John On Aug 10, 2009, at 5:54 AM, Simon Cox wrote: > What I find curious about this discussion, in the context of the > 'semantic > web', is that O&M and HollowWorld are quite honest about the > dependencies on > external resources. > Inevitably, this can lead to a rather large graph, if you chase them > all > down. > But the point of the 'web' is deferred resolution of references, so > you only > need look at a sub-graph at any one time, with interface classes/ > resources > represented as URIs. > > OTOH many of the ontologies I see coming out of the semantic web > community > have 'self-contained' as part of their design criteria. > This seems to miss out on the 'web' part of 'semantic web'. > -------------- NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS -------------- John Graybeal <mailto:jbgraybeal@mindspring.com> Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 04:55:49 UTC