Re: beyond 'formal' relations: describing relations between scientific and non-scientific material

Pat

thanks, yes, it helps, by getting into the heart of the discussion


 However, this is only a convention, and there is no fundamental logical
> requirement why this must be done: OWL-Full, RDF and Common Logic all do not
> make any strong distinction between relations and other entities.
>

but somehow, I (and perhaps others) see the lack of such a fundamental
disctinction and knowledge representation level the cause of confusion,
possible brittleness, at at user/pragmatic level, maybe even  a cognitive
barrier

(I darn cant get my mind around simple things such as domain/ range
definitions, I have to think three or four times at what I am doing /trying
to do cause its awkward)

for those who were brought up with data/modelling techniquest such as E/R
such distinctions may be central  although there is flexibility as to what
to model as what,  and properties are what we call attributes, I think

I wonder if at some point the OWL community is willing to take feedback from
users and engineers from different backgrounds, so that perhaps future
generations of web ontology languages can be less counter intuitive and
satisfy
different modelling requirements/criteria

or at least, start thinking about it....

cheers
pdm



> Hope this helps
>
> Pat Hayes
>
> , I would be intersted in a clarification of why/how is that so
>
>
> Paola
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Dennis - UT <dv.eprints@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We are currently working on a repository for OAI ORE resource maps (
>> http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc). In this system we are trying to
>> describe relations between scientific publications and other material (both
>> scientific and non-scientific). To do this we are planning to use several
>> (RDF) vocabularies / ontologies.
>>
>> A question is: how to cope with diversity in scientific disciplines and
>> communication on the one hand and standardizing relation descriptions when
>> aggregating publications about a certain topic? Vocabularies now available
>> (FOAF, DCterms, etc) mainly restrict to formal relations and do not include
>> relations concerning the content in a more detailed way than for instance
>> 'dc:subject'. This may be the consequence of the diversity in scientific
>> semantics. Is there any literature/article about this issue?
>>
>> An example case is describing relations between scientific publications
>> and their 'application'. For example: a publication proposes certain
>> changes, government policy makers later decide to create actual policies
>> based on this information. So far we didn’t find any existing solution to
>> describe such relations. Suggestions on existing vocabularies to describe /
>> annotate such relations are very welcome, thanks!
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Dennis
>> University of Twente
>>
>>
>
>