How to find a proper ontology/onto repositories

Dear all, issues around ontology repositories will be discussed at the SERES
ISWC workshop in Shanghai. As having an infrastructure that supports
finding, sharing and developing ontologies is critical for the advancement
of the SW I would like to invite you all to attend our workshop. There will
be a round table discussion from 17:15 until 18h. Cheers.




14:00-14:05 Welcome

14:05-14:30 Keynote speaker: Natasha Noy

14:30-14:35 Q&A

14:35-14:55 Adding Semantic Web Knowledge to Intelligent Personal Assistant
Agents<http://people.csail.mit.edu/pcm/tempISWC/workshops/SERES2010/seres10_submission_2.pdf>,
Piedad Garrido, Francisco J. Martinez and Christian Guetl

14:55-15:00 Q&A

15:00-15:20 Towards A Semantic & Domain-agnostic Scientific Data Management
System<http://people.csail.mit.edu/pcm/tempISWC/workshops/SERES2010/seres10_submission_3.pdf>
Yuan-Fang
Li, Gavin Kennedy, Faith Davies and Jane Hunter

15:20-15:25 Q&A

15:25-15:30 Ontology Reuse and Exploration via Interactive Graph
Manipulation<http://people.csail.mit.edu/pcm/tempISWC/workshops/SERES2010/seres10_submission_4.pdf>
Immanuel Normann and Oliver Kutz

15:30-15:35 Q&A

15:35-15:55 The EDM Council Semantics Repository - Considerations in
Ontology Alignment<http://people.csail.mit.edu/pcm/tempISWC/workshops/SERES2010/seres10_submission_7.pdf>
Mike
Bennett

15:55-16:00 Q&A

16:00-16:20 Coffee break

16:20-16:45 Keynote speaker: Peter Yim from the Open Ontology Repository
effort.

16:45-16:50 Q&A

16:50-17:10 Use Cases for the Interoperation between an Ontology Repository
and an Ontology Editor
<http://people.csail.mit.edu/pcm/tempISWC/workshops/SERES2010/seres10_submission_8.pdf>
 Tania Tudorache, Natalya F. Noy, Csongor Nyulas and Mark A. Musen

17:10-17:15 Q&A

17:15-18 Round table discussion, “Towards an Open Ontology Repository, why
open, how open, do we need it? What for? A federation?, use cases,
infrastructure, difficulties, etc”: Peter Yim, Kenneth Baclawski, Natasha
Noy, Jeff Pan.


On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Lee Feigenbaum <lee@thefigtrees.net> wrote:

> On 10/31/2010 7:19 PM, Enrico Motta 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.
>>
>
> Sure - but these are two qualitatively different questions, and it seemed
> to me that the OP was asking about simple vocabulary reuse.
>
> Just as it's rarely a good idea to write software libraries from scratch
> rather than reuse existing, tried and true code libraries, complex models
> should also be sought out and reused. I don't think the ontology search
> engines are a great way to go about that though. I'd almost never recommend
> that someone perform a "foobar filetype:java" google search to find a Java
> library to reuse dealing with foobar, as I'm likely to have a great deal of
> difficulty telling the wheat from the chaff. If I'm looking for a solution
> for a complex modeling challenge, using an arbitrary ontology that matches a
> search term like "role" or "event" or "units" or what-not seems as likely to
> be a bad idea as rolling my own. (Perhaps even a worse idea, because my
> sub-par home-rolled solution is more likely to at least address my immediate
> use cases in a reasonable fashion.)
>
> That said, sites like http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ are a tremendous
> value for this sort of search, and it'd be great if we had more actively
> evolving resources of this sort.
>
>
>  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.
>>
>
> Right, but there's an awful lot of subtlty and effort hidden in that word
> "useful" in that last sentence -- it's often near impossible to tell which
> results are useful and which are not!
>
> Lee
>
>
>  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
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an
>>> exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland
>>> (SC 038302).
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>


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