- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 16:48:38 -0500
- To: paola.dimaio@gmail.com
- Cc: Dennis - UT <dv.eprints@gmail.com>, semantic-web@w3.org
- Message-Id: <37562400-82C3-44FC-8774-70066E18501E@ihmc.us>
On Apr 1, 2009, at 2:32 PM, paola.dimaio@gmail.com wrote: > 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 Yes, you are not alone. BUt look: nobody is saying you MUST confuse (if that is what it seems) the levels. The more generous formalisms simply allow this extra syntactic freedom, they do not require it. In fact, it is highly liberating to get used to the more, er, relaxed attitude which comes with this freedom, IMO; but then Im an ex- programmer, and it does make ontology writing more like programming. Which may not be to everyone's taste, I concede. > > (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.... Believe me, they (we) did, and continue to do so. The problem is that there are more different modelling traditions out there than one can shake a stick at, so it has to compromise. The OWL system provides two 'versions' for just this reason: OWL-DL is the 'traditional' version with all the layering restrictions tightly in place, and OWL-Full is the let-it-all-hang-out version for scruffy RDF folk like myself. Just getting these two to more or less co-exist nearly killed us. Pat > > 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 >> >> >> > ------------------------------------------------------------ IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2009 21:49:22 UTC