Re: Defining subsets of existing OWL / RDF-S vocabularies in another vocabulary?

Martin
I have not seen a reply to this question, so I ll share some thoughts hoping 
to elicit further commentary
>
> Is it valid to locally define a subset of an existing OWL / RDF-S 
> vocabulary in your own vocabulary in order to
> a) avoid ontology imports or
> b) make it simple for annotation tools to display only a relevant subset 
> of that external vocabulary?

What you do with 'your own' vocabulary, is perfectly valid - as it only 
needs to pass
the validation criteria that you set 'internally'

>
> In other words, can I declare some FOAF or Dublin Core vocabulary 
> elements, which are relevant for my annotation task, locally in my new 
> domain vocabulary, instead of adding an import statement for the whole 
> vocabulary in the ontology header?

I dont see a problem with that

>
> If that was okay, it would make it easier to prepare pre-composed blends 
> of relevant ontologies that can be directly used for form-based instance 
> data creation.

Only when you you have export your vocabulary and represent it externally, 
you
have to make sure that the syntax of your schema is 'valid' based on the 
standard syntax
>

> However, I fear that defining an element that is residing in someone 
> else's URI space is not okay, since I (e.g. http://www.heppnetz.de) have 
> no authority of defining the semantics of an element that is within
> |http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/, even if I what I am saying is consistent with 
> the authoritative definition of the given vocabulary element. |

you have authority to map an external schema to your internal one, if that 
suits you
using xslt or other mapping tools

> ||
> ||I am assuming that I duplicate the very same specification of the 
> element, i.e., I would assure that my definition just replicates a subset 
> of the official vocabulary. I also abstract from semantic dependencies, 
> i.e., whether it is possible to specify a consistent subset of a given 
> vocabulary (this may not be trivial for an expressive DL ontology, but 
> should be feasible for lightweight RDF-S or OWL vocabularies).

maybe what are you thinking of here is a 'web service'? you import selected 
values from a schema
(say certain n nodes  within a vocabulary) but they reside still externally?

I just want to know whether this is an acceptable practice from
> a Web Architecture perspective.

from my perspectiv, anything that works well is acceptable - just gotta be 
clear
and well declared if it needs to be used in an open environment



Paola Di Maio
>
> Any feedback would be very much appreciated!
>
> Best
>
> Martin
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> martin hepp
> e-mail: martin.hepp@deri.at
> web:    http://www.heppnetz.de
> skype:  mfhepp
> office: +43 512 507 6465
>
> Check eClassOWL, the first real-world e-business ontology
> for products and services in OWL at
> http://www.heppnetz.de/eclassOWL
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2007 09:34:14 UTC