Re: Pound sign at the end of the URL of an ontology

Am Montag, den 27.06.2005, 08:18 -0700 schrieb James Cerra:
...
> 
> The whole schema is an information resource too by definition: the essence of a
> specification of a conceptualization is information.  And in practice (in OWL
> or RDFS cases), web ontology schemas are designed to be interpreted by a
> computer system as well as any human beings.  That's the whole point of the
> semantic web, right?  So...
Through some rdf-documents computer systems can get some information on
vocabulary terms, the document itself is an information resource, the
terms themselves aren't. Similarly as a foaf-file is an information
resource but the described person isn't.

I think the question is how vocabulary/ontology is defined, is it
defined as a document describing some terms (an information resource) or
rather as a set of terms, in which case I'd find it hard to understand
how a set of non-information resources can be an information resource.

I found the following:

http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide/#OWLGlossary says:

> Ontology Document
>         a Web document that contains an ontology, generally indicated
>         by the presence of an owl:Ontology element in the document
> Ontology
>         (1) collection of information, generally including information
>         about classes and properties
>         (2) the information contained in an ontology document

The distinction between "Ontology Document" and "Ontology" leads to the
assumptions that an ontology is not a document, the definition of
Ontology as collection of information makes me think it is.

If I understand Tim Bray correctly on
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Jul/0377.html he uses an
XML namespace as example for a resource that is not an information
resource.

Cheers,
reto

Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2005 07:15:23 UTC