Re: Vocab AND Ontology?

From: Norman Gray <norman-at-astro.gla.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:26:37 +0100

On 2007 Sep 23, at 18:23, Tony Linde wrote:

> 1. subject to discussion and resolution of the points raised in
> Andrea's
> Note, sections 3.1/2/3, we proceed with the creation of a SV by a
> subgroup
> of this wg;

The other possibility is not to create a new Standard Vocabulary at all, but instead formalise as SKOS the various deployed vocabularies we already have. Instead of creating a new one, we could use the time and effort to create the links between those vocabularies which would make it possible to for a user to use a term in one vocabulary they are familar with, and inherit the broader/narrower relations from a different vocabulary. This seems pretty pragmatic to me, and would I suspect be appreciated by the people who don't have to learn a new vocabulary.

Rick has already done almost all of the required work here, in normalising the form of these vocabularies, and identifying (mostly) UCD equivalences for some terms, which means that we're on the second rung already! All it needs is a stylesheet (which I can supply) to spit out SKOS.

Yesterday, I created SKOS vocabularies for the A&A an AOIM lists, derived from Rick's XML files, with some added broader/narrower structure, and using the equivalences via UCDs that Rick expressed. And it worked fine.

> 2. that the SV should be created in the OWL format, for which there
> are
> several tools, not least, Protege;

I'll second Bernard's cautions about this. There's no intrinsic merit, I think, in using OWL, and SKOS versions of other known vocabularies would be generated from other sources rather than edited by hand using a tool.

While I appreciate that there is some value in being flexible about formats, no-one has strongly advanced an argument for _not_ using SKOS. Since there's little information we want to include that we couldn't include in a SKOS format, and since it would be translatable from SKOS into something else without much difficulty, why don't we just settle on that and be done with it?

Ed mentioned:

> I provide an OWL skos ontology below.

The W3 version is at <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core>

All the best,

Norman

-- 
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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK
Received on 2007-09-24Z20:30:30