Re: How to find a proper ontology for my classes and properties?

Thank you for your answers, it will help me a lot!

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 2:19 AM, Enrico Motta <e.motta@open.ac.uk> wrote:

> At 23:22 -0400 30/10/10, Lee Feigenbaum wrote:
>
>> On 10/30/2010 10:40 AM, Juriy Katkov wrote:
>>
>>> Hello everyone!
>>> I have 2 questions about rdf data.
>>>
>>> 1. Suppose I started describing something in triples and I want to use a
>>> property 'hasOwner'. I understand that it's much better to use this
>>> property from one of the existing ontologies rather than use property
>>> from my own namespace.
>>> The question is: what is the easyest and the most right way to search
>>> for this property? I know, there is Swoogle and sometimes it helps me
>>> with that. I wonder if there is something better that fulltext search.
>>>
>>
>> There've been some great suggestions on this thread, but allow me to offer
>> the viewpoint that in many cases trying to find a predicate to reuse is not
>> worth the effort.
>>
>> The main goal of reuse is to allow your data to be consumed by software
>> tools that already know how to interpret an existing vocabulary. If that's
>> the case for your domain then great, it makes a lot of sense to reuse the
>> predicate. If that's not the case, or if you don't know if it's the case and
>> you find an arbitrary predicate that seems to convey the meaning you're
>> looking for, then I don't think there's much point in reusing vocabulary.
>> I'd rather save the time searching, mint my own property, and get on with
>> whatever I'm working on.
>>
>> Down the road if I see (or am told of) an application consuming similar SW
>> data using a different predicate, I can always update my data then and still
>> reap the benefits of reuse. Updating my data could be as simple as adding
>> rdfs:subPropertyOf or owl:equivalentProperty relations, or--if in a
>> reasonerless world--using a straightforward SPARQL Update statement to
>> augment your data.
>>
>> Reuse is great but, like code optimizations, it's often not necessary
>> upfront. It can be added later on once the real value of the reuse is
>> understood. And if you never see the value of reuse, then your data and/or
>> applications can flourish with the predicate that you minted for yourself,
>> and you saved yourself the time otherwise spent searching in the first
>> place.
>>
>
>
> Uhm...this is certainly true for the simple scenarios, but certainly not in
> general.  Of course, if I just have data about people and dogs and I simply
> want to link them with a property 'hasOwner', it is unlikely I am going to
> lose much by defining my own property and then worrying later about
> interoperability with other repositories. But if your model is a bit more
> complex and you have to handle any of the hundreds of modelling issues which
> people have been researching for the past 30 years (e.g., agency, roles,
> meta-properties, time, space, part-of, etc. etc..), then it may be a good
> idea to dig out existing modelling solutions rather than trying to come up
> with your own solution, which will take far more time and will likely be
> sub-optimal.
>
> You can do this by browsing repositories such as
> http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ or, as folks have already pointed out,
>  by using any of the various ontology search engines, such as swoogle,
> falcon, sindice, watson, etc.. And because at least some of these are
> integrated with ontology editors (e.g., there is a watson-based plugin for
> the neon toolkit - see
> http://neon-toolkit.org/wiki/Watson_for_Knowledge_Reuse), you can very
> quickly search for relevant properties (or classes or individuals) and then
> quickly add any useful results from your search to the ontology you are
> developing.
>
> Enrico
>
>
>
>  Lee
>>
>>
>>> 2. Suppose I face the dataset I never use before. What do you usually do
>>> first to get a first impression about the dataset? At the moment I first
>>> make some SPARQL queries to this dataset, such as:
>>> select COUNT(?x) WHERE
>>> {
>>> ?x a ?z .
>>> }
>>>
>>> than I use Marbles or Sig.ma to surf randomly over this data and finally
>>> I come up with a opinion where I need data from the dataset or not.
>>> Again, what do you usually do? Is there a tools or useful queries that
>>> can help Semantic Web user in browsing data and getting useful info
>>> about datasets?
>>>
>>> Thank you in advance!
>>>
>>> Yury Katkov
>>>
>>
>>
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>> 038302).
>>
>
>
> --
>
> The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt
> charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
>