Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

Hi Marco, all,

We have been using numerical identifiers in OBI, the Ontology for  
Biomedical Investigations, and formalized this via the policy Alan  
sent out earlier (see http://www.obofoundry.org/id-policy.shtml)
The OWL file is available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi.owl.  
You will see that all entities have a numerical URI (individuals,  
classes, properties...).

Cheers,
Melanie


On 18-May-11, at 1:50 PM, Marco Neumann wrote:

> Michael,
>
> indeed I did not not read Alan's email. I assume he refers to A-Box  
> identifiers only.
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Michael F Uschold  
> <uschold@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in  
> San Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN
> http://www..lotico.com/evt/stc2011/
>
>
>
> -- 
> Michael Uschold, PhD
>    Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
>    LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu
>    Skype, Twitter: UscholdM
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Marco Neumann
> KONA
>
> Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in  
> San Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN
> http://www.lotico.com/evt/stc2011/

---
Mélanie Courtot
MSFHR/PCIRN trainee, TFL- BCCRC
675 West 10th Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V5Z 1L3, Canada

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 21:21:37 UTC