Re: Need compelling story on the value of ontologies in fusing location-based data

[Danny Ayers

> > It would be *extremely* cool if, by consulting an OWL Location ontology,
> > an application could recognize that the location specified in document 2
> > is located *within* the bounding box specified in document 1.  Such an
> > example would get a *lot* of people in my community very excited about
> > OWL and RDFS.  Unfortunately, I can think of nothing in OWL or RDFS that
> > would help with this (I am eager to be proven wrong).  /Roger
>
> An application could easily do just that - it's only simple arithmetic
after
> all. Consider the application a service, orthogonal to the logic. The
> difficult part is expressing the information in an unambiguous fashion
that
> could be shared amongst the applications. As well as the input data you
have
> here, presumably you would need a way of expressing the result returned
from
> a SWS, A isInside B or whatever - thanks RDF/XML. To reason with this
you'd
> presumably need to be able to state things like {X isInside A}
disJointFrom
> {Y isInside A} - thanks OWL. The good bit is that none of this system is
> hard-wired (apart from the specific service), it's all entirely pluggable
> using declarations.
>

But Danny, the OWL ontology cannot tell Roger's app what to do with the data
that it classifies as "inside" (what it "means" to be "inside").  His app
has to know that beforehand.

Roger, can you make something of the CityWithARiver example from a few weeks
back?

Another problem I have with simple examples like this is that it is usually
obvious that some non-RDF app could also do the same thing.  Sometimes all
it would take would be the right database query, and any database person
would see that.  Not only do you have to come up with a good-sounding
example, but you have to tie it to the advantages that RDF/Ontologies/etc
could bring, instead of just creating yet another database.

Cheers,

Tom P.

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2003 20:22:34 UTC