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

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 13:19 +0200, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> If you really want to make sure that all agents encountering your  
> data work off the same vocabulary definitions, then you should  
> probably duplicate the relevant terms in your own namespace, creating  
> hepp:name and hepp:knows and so on, and declare them  
> owl:equivalentProperty to the original terms.

FWIW, the way I interpret Martin's situation (and I'll be glad for
corrections) is that he wants some specific tools to only see the
portion of the ontology, not all possible tools in the wild.

For instance, a tool that generates forms from an ontology for easy
input of instances would only see a few DC or FOAF properties and the
resulting forms would be easier and more appropriate to the given
application.

So I'd suggest just doing the copy&paste (with relevant disclaimers for
copyright, I think this is fair, though), testing that it works in the
tool in question, and being done with it. As long as dependencies are
taken into account in the copy&paste (as discussed by Alan), the
resulting data should also interoperate well with the rest of SW data,
which for me would be the biggest concern.

Therefore I'd say it's OK for Martin to subset DC and FOAF, it's not
like he's claiming to have the complete and authoritative definition of
DC and FOAF in his subsets, or that there would be risk of tools being
fooled into taking the subsets as the complete and authoritative defns.

Best regards,
Jacek

Received on Friday, 28 September 2007 13:01:20 UTC