reusing vocabularies / mapping withowl:equivalentClass

Hi there,

I want to derive a RDFa format from a microformat, an experimental version
of hRecipe in this case. I think of them both as serializations of a
vocabulary. To make the distiction clearer I'll call them vRecipe (the
implementation-neutral voacbulary), hRecipe (the microformat) and aRecipe
(the RDFa format).

I'm unsure how to map the vRecipe to RDFa. Should I reuse existing
vocabularies or should I develop a new one and then provide an OWL mapping
to existing vocabularies?

E.g. there's a title-element in vRecipe, called 'recipe-title'. In hRecipe,
the microformat serialization, it's called 'recipe-title' as well. Since
RDFa provides namespacing mechanisms it could be called 'hRecipe:title'
here. A mapping from 'hRecipe:title' to 'DC:title' -

    hRecipe:title owl:equivalentClass dc:title

- would make it clear that both are semantically equivalent. Although in
this example it's not obvious why not to use a straightforward mapping to
the wellknown DC:title in the first place, but the whole vRecipe vocabulary
needs mappings to a whole bunch of other vocabularies, some of them not so
well known, and it looks quite messy when mapped straightforwardly. It would
surely look much prettier - and was much easier to comprehend and use - if
it was developed from scratch (and from the vRecipe voacbulary respectively)
in a coherent way and *then* mapped to other, already existing vocabularies
with owl:equivalentClass.

I can see that the use of OWL adds complexity and that OWL can't be handled
"meaningfully" by simple RDF tools but I'm not sure how much of a problem
that is. Simple RDF tools can surely parse it which would be enough for a
lot of usage scenarios. The whole power of the semantic web otoh only comes
with RDFS and OWL and therefor it seems okay to me to use them like I did
above. Or am I adding complexity where I really shouldn't?

Cheers,
Thomas


..
Thomas Lörtsch
Living at Home Multi Media GmbH
Redaktion Online
...
Stubbenhuk 5
20459 Hamburg
....
eMail: loertsch.thomas@guj.de

Received on Tuesday, 14 October 2008 12:06:19 UTC