Re: gender: Why does vCard Ontology define class hierarchy instead of skos:Concept resources ?

Simon Spero:
> This approach can have several advantages;  for example,  one could
> define Cis and Trans as subclasses of Gender, with CisMale ≣ (Cis and
> Male) being automatically classified appropriately.  People would be
> instances of a Gender

I understand that approach and agree with those potential advantages.

But the purpose of the vCard Ontology is rather limited. According to
the Abstract it is

"a mapping of the vCard specification (RFC6350) to RDF/OWL. The goal is
to promote the use of vCard for the description of people and
organisations utilising semantic web techniques and allowing
compatibility with traditional vCard implementations."

> ... except... that's not what is being done here:

Yes, there seem to be a mismatches between the purpose of the
specification (mapping vCard *to* RDF/OWL), the introduction of a class
hierarchy, the flatness of the hierachy and the use of that hierarchy in
the specification.

These mismatches are not restricted to the Gender classes. All code sets
in the vCard Ontology are flat class hierarchies:
http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf/#Code_Sets

To me all of that looks more like an application of the antipattern
"rampant classism" than an enablement of advanced uses of OWL classes.

Cheers,
Andreas

Received on Thursday, 5 June 2014 06:51:05 UTC