Semantic Elephants: Versioning, URIs, UniqueIds, owl:sameAs, Managing Coreference

All,

I analyzed some past threads and teased out and summarized three distinct
modeling issues.

   1. Overloading OWL
sameAs<http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Community:Overloading_OWL_sameAs>:
   sameAs is being used in the linked data community in a way that is
   inconsistent with its semantics
   2. Proliferation of URIs, Managing
Coreference<http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Community:Proliferation_of_URIs%2C_Managing_Coreference>:
   How to avoid or manage two negative consequences to the current
   proliferation of new URIs being minted for the same things. Specifically:
      1. it is hard to find when two things should be the same
      2. even if you can find the links, prolific use of owl:sameAs will
      create computational problems.
   3. Versioning and
URIs<http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Community:Versioning_and_URIs>:
   When and whether to make new URIs for different versions of things.

I added them to the Catalog of Modeling
Issues<http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Community:Main>in the
Ontology
Design Pattern Wiki <http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki>.  Click on the
links for more details.

What is the Catalog of Modeling
Issues?<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Apr/0214.htmlhttp://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Apr/0214.html>

Below is a bit of background on the history of this discussion.

Michael

PS The individuals in the CC: of this email were directly involved in the
original discussions.

*Background:*

In May 2008, I kicked off a discussion with the subject "A Semantic
Elephant" describing the unnecessary and costly proliferation of URIs and
owl:sameAs links. This discussion evolved to be mostly about managing
co-reference. Intitially private, this discussion was moved to the W3C
Semantic Web Discussion
List<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/>at Tim
Berners-Lee's request. See: Managing
Co-reference (Was: A Semantic
Elephant?)<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008May/0081.html>.


The original discussion also evolved into a discussion about owl:sameAs per
se, which has been a recurring topic on various lists over the years. Aldo
Gangemi provided a concise summary on May 16,
2008<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008May/0126.html>.


In October 2008, I started a closely related discussion focused more on
challenges with Versioning and URIs. It was under the subject: URIs and
Unique IDs<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Oct/0192.html>.


>From all this, I teased out the three distinct but closely related modeling
isssues listed above. For each I created a detailed summary of the issues
and topics that were discussed
Michael

Received on Monday, 3 May 2010 20:30:36 UTC