Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Marco Neumann <marco.neumann@gmail.com>wrote:

> Glenn,
>
> it's not feasible, nor enforceable, nor desirable to develop ontologies
> entirely with random URIs as identifiers.


*Perhaps you have not seen Alan Ruttenberg's email on this topic. I think
they do exactly this.  It was no free lunch, they had a lot of work to do to
make this doable -- in large part because as Glenn says, the duality of:
"machines need to think in ids and people need to think in names" is not
well supported by tools or methodology.*


> I am of the opinion that local names should indeed be designed with
> meaningful names in mind last but not least to improve the ontology
> engineering process. Though that said there might be exceptions such as NLP
> and ML where automatic tagging and ontology creation with random URIs can
> useful, but that's a special use case.
>
> Marco
>
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:55 PM, glenn mcdonald <glenn@furia.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree wholeheartedly that URIs should be pure identifiers, with no
>> embedded semantics or assumptions of readability. And I agree with Kingsley
>> that there's an elephant in the room. I might even agree with Kingsley about
>> what the elephant is.
>>
>> But to say it from my point of view: machines need to think in ids, people
>> need to think in names. The RDF/SPARQL "stack", such as it is, has not
>> internalized the implications of this duality, and thus isn't really
>> prepared to support both audiences properly. Almost all the canonical
>> examples of RDF and SPARQL avoid this issue by using toy use-cases with
>> semi-human-readable URIs, and/or with literals where there ought to be
>> nodes. If you try to do a non-trivial dataset the right way, you'll
>> immediately find that writing the RDF or the SPARQL by hand is basically
>> intractable. If you try to produce an human-intelligible user-interface to
>> such data, you'll find yourself clinging to rdfs:label for dear life, and
>> then falling, falling, falling...
>>
>> In fact, there's almost nothing more telling than the fact that rdfs:label
>> is rdfS! This is in some ways the most fundamental aspect of human/computer
>> data-interaction, and RDF itself has essentially nothing to say about it.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Marco Neumann
> KONA
>
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-- 
Michael Uschold, PhD
   Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
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