Re: RDF validation of vocabulary

To some extent, the OWL 1.1 proposal provides some help in this
direction (although somewhat compromised by backwards compatability).

The basic idea is that an ontology should declare the terms (classes,
properties, etc.) that are used in it.  Uses of undeclared terms are
then not structurally consistent with ontology and are, in some sense,
suspect.

See 

http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Syntax#Declarations_and_Structural_Consistency

for more information.


Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research




From: "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org>
Subject: RDF validation of vocabulary
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:03:12 -0500

[...]

> What I *suspect* you're looking for here, Karl, is not really something
> the Semantic Web Recommendations, alone, can give you.  At least for me,
> when I find myself asking questions like this, what I really want is a
> tool to check that a document is a proper element of some
> interface/protocol.  Have I communicated in this file what I should
> communicate in Dublin Core data?  Does this file look right for FOAF
> tools to work properly with it?
> 
> But there is no way to answer those questions because even though there
> are specifications of DC and FOAF, they don't get into those details.
> For that you'd need some other specification, giving baseline details
> about what information must be present in some DC or FOAF document which
> is expected to be used for some purpose, etc.  
> 
> And it would be nice to have that specification be machine readable, so
> that it could be validated by a machine.  We're not there yet -- no one
> is writing specs like that (as far as I know), and there is no standard
> language in which to write them, anyway.
> 
> Some approaches approaches:
> 
>    - Document some SPARQL queries and characterize what the responses
>      MUST, SHOULD, MAY, and MUST NOT look like.
> 
>    - Define an XML Schema for your data, use XML Schema Validation for
>      data validation, and GRDDL (or otherwise map) it to RDF.
> 
>    - Define an alternate semantics or extension for OWL which allows OWL
>      documents to be used in this way.  See [1].
> 
> FWIW, I don't see any easy or quick solution here, and I think this is a
> major obstacle for the Semantic Web.   
> 
>     -- Sandro
> 
> [1] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/Publications/download/2007/MoHS07a.pdf
>

Received on Monday, 26 November 2007 15:20:09 UTC