Vocab AND Ontology?

[Tony Linde]

> Correspondingly, the OWL is
> trivially produced from either format if you're interested (some of
> us are definitely NOT).

This seems the core question, Rick (whatever the starting point and I agree
that the IAU Thesaurus seems a good one from my naive pov): do we produce
the SV in OWL and derive the SKOS or produce it in SKOS and derive the OWL?

I'd still plump for the former for the following reasons:

a. either approach seems, at the outset, to involve little cost (though I'd
still assert that the availability of Protege and other ontology tools make
this a cheaper route);

b. any extensions to the ontology will break the link between vocabulary and
ontology since the extensions could not be derived from the vocab so we
could well end up with divergent terms meaning the same thing;

c. it seems that no matter how the ontology (with vocab included) is
extended, we can still derive the vocabulary providing we mandate that vocab
terms use the classes and relationships specified.

This is a fairly simplistic view, I know. Can anyone show any methodological
or technical problem with this approach (I don't think Rick pointed out any
real problems with the OWL-based approach: what ontological baggage might
cause problems)?

And this is still only my view - others will have their own position on the
question above.

T.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-semantics at eso.org [mailto:owner-semantics at eso.org] On
> Behalf Of Frederic V. Hessman
> Sent: 24 September 2007 10:14
> To: semantics at ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: Vocab AND Ontology?
> ...