Re: URIs : How to find the ontologies behind them

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: URIs : How to find the ontologies behind them


> From: "Eli Israel" <Eli@SemanticWorld.Org>
> Subject: URIs : How to find the ontologies behind them
> Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 13:08:04 +0300
>
> > A question about URIs:
> >
> > The URI for a class does not have to point to a particular resource on
the
> > web, it just has to be unique.  An ontology describing that entity may
be
> > located somewhere else entirely.
> >
> > If an ontology refers to this class by its URI, how is additional, or
even
> > primary, information about that class supposed to be found?
>
> Well, just about anywhere, at least in the general case.  For example,
> suppose that the class is rdfs:Class.  Information about rdfs:Class can be
> found in just about any RDF document.
>
> Of course, there are very many cases where a lot of information about a
> class (or any other property) should be found (maybe not now, but when the
> Semantic Web actually gets going) by dereferencing a URI related to the
URI
> references of the class.  Of course, this would only be one organization's
> information about the class, and other agents might reasonably have
> different views.
Thanks for the quick response.

I'm primarily interested in the 'when the SW gets going' case (it's about
time we get it going, no? ;).  You seem to be saying that a best practice
would be to put the OWL describing the resource in the place that the URI of
the resource refers to.

If OWL documents are named seperate from their namespaces, and an agent
can't find the document by following the URI, it would have to rely on an
index of documents describing entities.  How would these documents be found,
registered, etc.?  They wouldn't be naturally interlinked through the
ontologies, they would have to be dug up on the www, or registered in a
repository.

It seems like the easiest way is to place the ontology describing the
concept at the URI for the concept, no?


> > Any help is appreciated.
> >
> > Eli Israel, Director
> > www.SemanticWorld.Org
>
> Peter F. Patel-Schneider
> Bell Labs Research
> Lucent Technologies

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2003 11:42:22 UTC