Re: [vcard] OWL or RDF for vCard?

I see no real problem with including an OWL cardinality constraint in 
the schema. This does not require individuals to become fully conversant 
with OWL when they create vCard information and it is more than likely 
that such constraints will be broken, however, this only becomes 
critical in some situations. In those situations, an application has a 
defined rule to apply and a well specified way to determine the outcome 
(i.e. OWL). If it not critical to _that application_ that a cardinality 
constraint is broken, well, then it won't include an OWL parser and it 
won't matter.

Mind you, it goes without saying that the more that can be done within 
RDF/S, the better.

Phil



Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
> 
> Harry Halpin wrote:
>> In detail, these are the only parts of OWL used are cardinality
>> constraints [1], while in the original vCard/RDF[2] it was implied that
>> not having these sort of constraints was not a bug, but a feature:
>>
>> So, do we need these? Or do they complicate things? If we have
>> cardinality constraints they allow us "round-tripping" without loss of
>> data, but if don't have them them people can have much more flexible
>> names and organizations and the like, and keep vCard in RDF/S as opposed
>> to OWL.
>>   
> Why not create two ontologies, with the second one (with cardinality 
> constraints) further constraining the first one (those without)?  So, 
> when people use the vCard, they can use the rdfs:isDefinedBy to suggest 
> to an RDF engine if additional constraints should be retrieved or not?
> 
> I am a firm believer of ontology modularization.  I think we should 
> avoid build large monolithic ontology at all cost. We should build 
> ontologies on small scales.  Doing so will help users to pick and mix 
> also it will help ontology's graceful evolution.
> Xiaoshu
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2007 11:08:46 UTC