[Ontology] UCDs vs ontologies?

[Elizabeth Auden]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for all your comments.

> Would you mind if I integrate what you have into the more general
> ontology that I have been working on?
> http://archive.astro.umd.edu/ont/Documentation/index.html

Yes, that would be fine.

> I will try to answer some of your questions posted at the ivoa web site.

> > How do I include objects and properties from one OWL formatted
> > ontology into another OWL formatted ontology?

> First you need to import the other ontology:

Thanks for that. I'll incorporate the ontology imports and other
suggestions below into the next version of my VOEvent OWL file.

> By the way, I am planning on working on STC.owl soon.  But you are
> welcome to take a first crack at it if you wish.

Race you! I can definitely have a go - I'll aim to post a first cut
towards the end of next week. STC 1.21, yes?

> I am doing essentially the same thing.  Also, I am making classes begin
> with a capital letter and properties (object or dataproperties) start
> with a lower case letter.

Great, I think that our formats will be in agreement then:
Classes: Class, ClassName, NameOfClass
Properties: property, propertyName, nameOfProperty

> But I could easily be convinced to have both start with lower
> case unless it is a mnemonic or a proper name.

Using "IVOA" as an example, would it be better to go with

Classes: IVOAclass, IVOAClass, IvoaClass?
Properties: IVOAproperty, IVOAProperty, ivoaProperty?

> > the Param and Importance classes have a value attribute. For
> > Param, value should be a string, but for Importance, value should
> > be an integer.

> a) your way.
> b) One could just use string and then any number is acceptable as well.
> c) One could use xsd:AnySimpleType for value and then in Param restrict
> it to xsd:string and in Importance restrict it to integer.
> Note that I prefer q:hasValue which takes a q:Quantity which has datum,
> error, and units.  Of course then one has an issue with datum.

Hmm. I will play around with a mix of c) and your suggestion for
"hasValue" and see what happens.

> > "English Prose Tooltip Generator"

> I have not seen this yet.

I haven't either, and googling for the phrase only turns the OWL tutorial
where I found the reference. However, there seem to be a number of other
tooltip generators that provide useful mouse-over documentation. I'll
contact the OWL tutorial guys at Manchester and see what they can tell me
about this software.

> The terms in VOEvent do have superclasses in the larger ontology that I
> am working on, but these were not needed in what your small cut.


I'll leave them alone for now  - it will be interesting to see what
superclasses arise as small ontologies are federated. Bernard brought up a
good point in another email to the IVOA semantics about "What" and
"WhereWhen" being awkward names for classes, although these came from the
VOEvent document. If this small ontology is subsumed into a larger STC or
"all space" ontology, it would make sense to map the What and WhereWhen
concepts to other location and time superclasses. However, if this
ontology should stick closely to the VOEvent schema, What and WhereWhen
may need to stay.

> Re: cardinalities and disjoint

Thanks for the pointers; I'll specify cardinality where appropriate in the
next version and leave out disjoints until a classes that actually need to
be disjoint arise.

cheers,
Elizabeth