Re: reusing vocabularies / mapping withowl:equivalentClass

Hi Thomas,

On 14.10.2008, at 15:33, Thomas Loertsch wrote:

> OTOH standardizing eg a vocabulary for recipes alone is hard enough.  
> There's
> no realistic hope for *the one* vocabulary to connect them all. The  
> semantic
> web won't happen without some inferencing - be it through OWL or  
> some other
> language. So, instead of developing a "vocabulary starter pack"  
> which could
> at best be another DC, wouldn't it make more sense to establish a
> clearinghouse/registry where mappings are published?

Oh, I didn't mean a starter pack with new terms! That would indeed be  
a rather hopeless endeavour. What I meant was picking the most  
commonly used or most useful terms from well-known ontologies. This  
would amount to something like a best practices document. E.g.,

"If you want to express that something has a name/title/label, use  
rdfs:label."

> That way a query for everything with a 'title' could automagically  
> sparql
> the clearinghouse for every owl:equivalentClass of 'title' and add  
> those to
> the original query. That's a scalable solution and it doesn't need  
> much
> (actually none if I'm not mistaken) inferencing power either.

That's an interesting idea. It would be interesting to find how this  
compares performance-wise to "ordinary" inferencing.

Knud

> Cheers,
> thomas
>
>
> On 14.10.08 15:43, "Knud Hinnerk Möller" <knud.moeller@deri.org>  
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm all for reusing existing terms, see below.
>>
>> On 14.10.2008, at 10:48, Thomas Loertsch wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>
>> During VoCamp Oxford last month a number of people including me
>> discussed the problem that in the SW world there are too many
>> different terms (properties and classes) that mean the same thing (or
>> almost the same thing). Your title property is probably the best
>> example: almost every new ontology or vocabulary mints their own new
>> URI for saying "this is the name of that". There is rdfs:label,
>> dc:title, foaf:name, sioc:title, doap:title, skos:prefLabel, ical:summary
>> , ... A lot of ontology designers then go about and say that their  
>> new
>> name/title/label property is a subproperty of rdfs:label, or
>> equivalent to it. But as you say yourself, these assertions will only
>> help if the right kind of reasoning is performed - and this, I'm
>> afraid, mostly doesn't happen. The fact that RDF tools can parse the
>> data doesn't solve the problem, because after that you'll also want  
>> to
>> _do_ something witht the data. E.g., as a result, it is quite hard to
>> query an RDF store for something basic such as "list me all the
>> resources you have and their name". If there is no reasoning taking
>> place, then all you can do is to include all possible label  
>> properties
>> in the query, which is obviously not feasible.
>>
>> So, long story short: I think everyone should try to use the same
>> properties and classes all the time, if possible, and as long as
>> reasoning cannot be taken for granted. Maybe during the next VoCamp  
>> in
>> Galway, I'm hoping to put together something like a "vocabulary
>> starter pack" for the SW, suggesting a property or class for some
>> basic annotation needs such "this is the name of that". I'm not sure
>> yet how good the idea is, but I have a feeling something like that
>> would be beneficial.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Knud
>>
>>> - 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------
>> Knud Möller, MA
>> +353 - 91 - 495086
>> Smile Group: http://smile.deri.ie
>> Digital Enterprise Research Institute
>>   National University of Ireland, Galway
>> Institiúid Taighde na Fiontraíochta Digití
>>   Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh
>>
>>
>
>
>
> .
> Thomas Lörtsch
> Living at Home Multi Media GmbH
> Redaktion Online
> ..
> Stubbenhuk 5
> 20459 Hamburg
> ...
> eMail: loertsch.thomas@guj.de
>
>

-------------------------------------------------
Knud Möller, MA
+353 - 91 - 495086
Smile Group: http://smile.deri.ie
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
   National University of Ireland, Galway
Institiúid Taighde na Fiontraíochta Digití
   Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh

Received on Tuesday, 14 October 2008 14:43:21 UTC