Vocab AND Ontology?

[Norman Gray]

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