Re: rdf inclusion

On Thu, 23 May 2002, Drew McDermott wrote:

>
>   [Tim Berners-Lee]
>   You are (unlike in english) bound to use a term according to its
>   creator's definition.
>
> What definition?
>
>   [Jim Hendler]
>   ... we can figure out some way to "import" only the cyc#dog facts or
>   otherwise say when you use a URI from an ontology it only "commits"
>   to some localized stuff (perhaps only the exact subgraph you point
>   to)
>
> What subgraph?
>
> If someone can provide a natural definition of "the chunk of an
> ontology implied by a reference to a subset of its nodes," then I will
> listen to alternatives to the idea that you import ontologies as
> wholes.  Otherwise, as far as I can see, it's the only game in town.

Yeah, this is tricky.

FWIW, I've rigged the namespace http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/ to return
chunks of the wordnet noun hierarchy projected into RDF classes.
deferencing http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Tree or .../Car or .../Person
gets a fragment of the larger (much larger) ontology. Don't look too
closely, the generated markup has bugs, but the scenario should at least
be reasonably clear.

I don't claim this provides a 'natural definition', but it does seem more
useful than having the entire multi-megabyte wordnet RDF thing be
downloadable at the schema namespace URI.

Dan

Received on Thursday, 23 May 2002 18:51:44 UTC