Is ontology an information resource?

Hi all,

I (still again?) have some problems in my attempt to publish an ontology on the Web.

So please let me solve them by giving your advices.
Let me ask questions one by one, for some of them might be automatically solved by
preceding answers.

My first question is as follows

QUESTION:  Is an ontology an information resource or non-information resource?

Reto Bahmann-Gmür said in his message[1] an ontology can be seen as 
an information resource, and Tim BL said in his message[2] 
[[
when any term in that namespace S looked up, it is the  
document <http://ont.example.org/myOnt/example> which is dereference.

That resource is the ontology. 
]].

So it seems there is a consensus that an ontology is an information resource.

In "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies"[3], however,
Recipe 3, 4, 5 shows
that a Client will receive a 303 response for a request for 'vocabulary URI',
where the document says in its Introduction
[[
In this document, vocabulary and ontology are used interchangeably.
]] ,
which together with the TAG's httpRange-14 resolution[4] might imply
that an ontology is a non-information resource...

Chris Bizer's "How to Publish Linked Data in the Web"[5] also shows an
example for a client to request a 'vocabulary URI' and get 303 response,
though what 'vocabulary' means is not explicitly defined in that document.

And Leo Sauermann's 'Cool URIs for the Semantic Web'[6] shows an
example where a request for http://www.acme.com/about#alice (and
http://www.acme.com/about) will get 303 redirect (in section 4.2),
which makes me assume http://www.acme.com/about is a non-information 
resource. But is it not an ontology?

Many thanks in advance

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Jul/0129.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Jul/0132.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues#httpRange-14
[5] http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial
[6] http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/11/cooluris
Best,
Yoshio Fukushige


-- 
Yoshio Fukushige <fukushige.yoshio@jp.panasonic.com>
Network Development Center,
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 03:35:54 UTC