Re: Use or alias in vCard/RDF?

Hi
> Can we move this up a level?
>
> There are several properties in the vCard ontology that are
> conceptually "the same as" some other properties from other
> ontologies ...
>
> It seems to me that we can/should/could either deprecate all of these
> in favor of the properties from other namespaces or we could keep the
> local aliases and make them (some flavor of) sameAs the other
> properties.
>   
Allow me to move this up even a level higher. We've been discussing also 
those days on SKOS forum around similar issues about various flavours of 
same-ness.
Strating here : 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Nov/0014.html
I've just tried to sum up this quite arcane thread there : 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2006Nov/0062.html
Seems to me such discussions should lead to some good practices 
concerning the use (and dangers of abuse) of owl:sameAs, and possible 
alternatives. I've been hammering this for a while here and there. 
Besides owl:sameAs the RDF toolkit does not provide a lot of flavors of 
same-ness, (I don't know which ones you have in mind, Norm), and seems 
to me that if people keep creating new classes, properties instead of 
re-using existing ones, it's because they consider that the concept in 
their application domain is not *exactly* the same as the one of the guy 
next door. In which IMO they are generally true. OTOH, they certainly 
would like to express some relationship with the concept next door, 
generally boiling down to some variation on: "This formal concept I have 
tailored to my exact needs, I know the guy next door has tailored 
another one which basically represents the same thing, but neither of us 
want those to be formally merged, if only because we want to keep our 
models somehow independent, not trigger unexpected merging or inferences 
etc."
Default a standard way to do that in RDF, we end up with long 
discussions on which should be a subproperty, subclass, hyponym, of 
what, or give up and declare a vague "seeAlso" or, fingers crossed, a 
definitive owl:sameAs with unforeseeable consequences.

SKOS conceptual framework allows interesting alternatives, as the above 
quoted thread shows (hopefully). I'm not sure they are portable to OWL 
framework, though.

Cheers

Bernard

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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Received on Monday, 27 November 2006 19:11:56 UTC