- From: John Graybeal <graybeal@mbari.org>
- Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 21:25:40 -0800
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Michael F Uschold" <uschold@gmail.com>, semantic-web@w3.org, aldo.gangemi@gmail.com, "Conor Shankey" <cshankey@reinvent.com>, "Peter Mika" <pmika@yahoo-inc.com>, "Ora Lassila" <ora.lassila@nokia.com>, "Pan, Dr Jeff Z." <jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk>, "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@csail.mit.edu>, "Frank van Harmelen" <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl>, sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk, obo-format@lists.sourceforge.net
On Nov 9, 2008, at 8:50 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote: > I should point out that within the Open Biomedical Ontologies there is > an explicit policy of *not* changing URIs as new versions of the > ontology are released - for one thing that would be impractical - some > of them are updated daily. Rather there is a policy on deprecation - > terms that are deprecated are marked as such and kept in the ontology > so as not to leave dangling pointers. Term deprecation works for me. And I think there does need to be a single (i.e., unversioned) URI for each term, that always reflects the 'latest semantics' of a given term. My view is that we're really creating a dictionary that maps a string to a definition (crudely put)*, and yes the semantics/definition for a term may change over time, so that should be reflected in the 'latest' expression of the term (the one that the 'latest semantics' URI represents). But I think there also needs to be an appreciation that the exact concept associated with that term is evolving over time, and each time it explicitly evolves, that is a slightly (or hugely, sometimes) different conceptualization. It isn't at all impractical to create a new URI for each such change, even if it changes every minute, at least that I can see. What I like about this scenario is that a user can use either concept for the term -- the very specific versioned one, or the unversioned 'latest' one -- according to what they want to express. I don't see why both concepts shouldn't be available. I tend toward the opinion (thanks to Michael U's arguments) that changing the versioned URI should only occur when something about the term is explicitly changed -- new versions of the vocabulary, in and of themselves, are not sufficient. John * So Peter's defense of visible names resonates for me. -------------- John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal@mbari.org> -- 831-775-1956 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
Received on Monday, 10 November 2008 05:26:28 UTC