Re: Vocabulary re-use

IMO, it boils down to finding an efficient trade-off between 
standardization effort on one hand and mediation effort on the other hand.

Aligning your vocabularies before populating any is more effort in the 
beginning but saves labor using the data.

Publishing data referring to proprietary vocabularies is less effort for 
the publisher but causes a lot of labor for users of the data.

The efficient point will be in between those two extremes, and in any 
case it is better to bring data on the Web using a non-standard schema 
than not bringing the data on the Web.

As for extending common vocabs, I ask for caution. Doing so in a manner 
that causes more good than bad requires that you understand the 
conceptualization of the ontology which you are reusing/extending.

Martin


Aaron Rubinstein wrote:
> I'm rather new to Semantic Web technologies and have yet to get my 
> head around one particular issue.  There seems to be some debate about 
> when it's appropriate to create a domain specific vocabulary or when 
> it's best to reuse or extend an existing vocabulary.  It strikes me as 
> important for widespread adoption of Semantic Web technologies to not 
> duplicate effort and confuse data publishers by creating different 
> vocabularies for similar concepts/domains.  On the other hand, it 
> seems inherent to the nature of the Web to be able to describe 
> knowledge and present data in any way one pleases, allowing for the 
> greatest diversity of view points and opinions.  I suppose part of my 
> question is, what should be a general rule for deciding when to extend 
> versus when to create from scratch?  Is it as simple as:
>
> 1.  Search existing vocabularies.
>
> 2.  If a relevant vocabulary exists, use it.
>
> 3.  If there is a close match, extend it using terms specific to your 
> domain.
>
> 4.  If there are no vocabularies that can come close to describing 
> your domain, create your own using RDFS/OWL.
>
> The other part of my question is: does it matter?  Can the Semantic 
> Web support a plethora of similar but distinct vocabularies as long as 
> applications are 'smart' enough to interpret the ontology and make 
> inferences accordingly?
>
> These questions arise, to a certain extent, out of what seems like a 
> prevalent practice to convert existing encoding standards from certain 
> domains that are described using XML Schemas into RDF using RDFS and 
> OWL, without much awareness of existing ontologies that might suit the 
> needs of the domain just as well.  In a nutshell, is this OK or is it 
> bad for the Semantic Web?
>
> Many thanks for considering my questions.
>
> Best,
>
> Aaron Rubinstein
>
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-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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