Re: Semantic Web Best Practices

Natasha Noy wrote:
[cc-ed to www-rdf-interest with permission]

> Guus Schreiber wrote:
> 
>>
>> Some members of W3C's' Semantic Web Coordination Group have been working 
 >> on a draft charter for a new Best Practices Working Group, see:
>>
>>     http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/public/bp-charter.html
 >
> Guus,
> 
> Thanks a lot for producing the draft -- it looks very good. Just a 
> couple of small comments:

Natasha,

Thanks very much for your comments.

> 
> On the criteria for including ontologies in Focus area 1: It seems that 
> the second ("the ontology has a user community") is more or less implied 
> by the first ("the ontology is the result of collaborative work of some 
> community..."). It's hard to imagine a user community that would work on 
> a consensus ontology and then not use it.

At the moment I wrote this I thought there were examples of 
collaborative efforts that are not really used, but I must admit I 
cannot come up with an example right away.

> On the other hand, do you want to mention anything about commitment to 
> maintenance? For instance, one can imagine the following criteria:
> - If the ontology is updated by its owners, the owner is willing to 
> commit to make the revision publicly available (or something along these 
> lines).
> 
> It seems that it would defy at least some of the purpose of the library 
> to have someone contribute a "standard" in some field, then go off and 
> change this standard and not make it public.

Yes, good point. I will include this maintenance criterion.

> One of the big question that I have after reading "Focus 1" is the 
> following: whose job is it going to be to convert these standard 
> terminologies, etc. to RDF/OWL. If it's their owners, then this should 
> be also one of the criteria for including the ontology: "The ontology is 
> represented in RDF/OWL". I am assuming it's not on the working-group 
> agenda to do the conversion. Or is it the case that ontologies in any 
> representation can be in the library? The latter option doesn't sound 
> very practical since then it won't actually help new RDF/OWL users to 
> link to these resources.

The idea was that the WG would provide support conversion in two ways:

- general support: WG note on conversion guidelines
- specific support: group of volunteers helping with the actual
   conversion of a particular ontology/vocabulary

For the latter group I was thinking off people who have actively used 
the ontology/vocabulary and in whose interest it would be to have an 
"official" RDF version. For example, we have a lot of interest in the 
Getty thesauri and would be willing to provide support in the conversion 
process. Other people have done work on converting WordNet, etc.

So, although it is not the responsibility of the WG to do the 
conversion, I expect there will be volunteers willing to provide 
(varying levels of) support.

> And just a typo: The phrase "Product vocabularies, e.g." (under example 
> ontologies) links to the NCI site. It shouldn't be a link at all.

To be corrected.

> On Focus 3 (tools and demo applications).
> I propose a couple additional bullets:
> - ontology/knowledge-vase editors
> - tools for marking up web pages
> - applications that use rdf/owl mark-up (at least as examples).
> - APIs

I will add these to the list.

> Also, on this focus area: The phrase "Facilities for open-source 
> development" seems to stand out of place. Is this supposed to be on of 
> the bullets? In that case, I am not sure it really belongs here: it's 
> not rdf/owl-specific in any way (assuming I understood its meaning 
> correctly). Or is it part of a sentence that got lost somehow?

This sentence was meant to indicate that we are focusing here on 
open-source software tools. I will make this clearer.

> Hope this helps.

Yes, thanks.
Guus

> 
> Natasha

-- 
Free University Amsterdam, Computer Science
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Tel: +31 20 444 7739/7718
E-mail: schreiber@cs.vu.nl
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Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2003 13:10:40 UTC