Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

Hi Alan,

On May 19, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> On Thursday, May 19, 2011, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:
>> Hi Michael:
>> On May 18, 2011, at 9:11 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:
>> 
>>> This is a a limitation with current tools.
>> 
>> "Current tools", i.e. the ecosystem in which we expect broad adoption of SW technology, is not just a temporary, minor obstacle;
>> it is likely THE most important aspect our technical proposals must fit to.
> 
> This view is incredibly short sighted, and shows little awareness of
> the actual historical evolution of technological innovation.

If you thinks so....
Why are we using HTML and not SGML for the Web?
Note that I am not asking for stupid, first-hand simplicity. 
Many URIs are identifiers that are sometimes handled directly by humans, so they should support this by short English keywords.

Proposing an innovation that has the broad adoption of an additional layer of tooling as a prerequisite will be unsuccessful. 

By the way, I am not suggesting that ALL ontologies should use human-readable identifiers. In fact, eClassOWL, my first e-commerce ontology, uses cryptic identifiers, because the size of 30 k classes prohibits manual coding anyway.

But for small Web vocabularies like FOAF, GoodRelations, DC, and SIOC, I stick to my claim that using cryptic concept identifiers is a terribly wrong proposal.

> Are we
> still using Mosaic to browse the web? Do you not think the development
> of the many cms for web, or the build your own site from template
> tools offered by  providers had nothing to do with broad scale
> adoption of HTML. Here you are thinking, despite your protestations,
> like a computer programmer. But one who hasn't yet taken the required
> course In languages and compilers.
Thanks for the kind assessment.

>> 
>> Otherwise, the SW will be as successful as OS/2 in the OS market, with IBM requiring adopters to replace all existing tools and applications in order to get the benefits of a better operating system.
> 
> ?
> To the contrary your argument would be designing for DOS should have
> been the accepted standard for ensuring innovation in operating
> systems.

I think Kingsley has a nice way of distinguishing between stupidly-simple and cleverly-simply. Complexity per se is bad for broad adoption. If I want to design an OS, I should also take into account potential adoption, because technology can only have a positive impact on human lives when it is being used by many people. I suggest reading the basics of standardization economics, e.g.

Os Shy: The Economics of Network Industries (2001).
Best
Martin



> 
> -Alan
> 
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>> 
>> 
>

Received on Thursday, 19 May 2011 13:27:38 UTC