Vocab AND Ontology?

[Bernard Vatant]

Ed

Let me be clear about this once for all.
Although I've been participating in Topic Maps standard development back 
in 2000-2001, I am not considering myself a "Topic Mapper", nor a 
"SKOS-er" nor a "Whatev-er". We are speaking about tools and 
engineering, not about religion.

I've never written : OWL is bad, SKOS is good. Please re-read my 
different messages. I wrote : different tools, different purposes, so 
you have to clearly define the task to achieve before defining the tool. 
There is no killer language in knowledge representation. They are all 
nets we throw in the ocean of reality, trying to capture whatever we 
can. Depending of the nets we use, we catch different species of fish, 
never the water of reality. Since I like the diversity of fish, I like 
to use different kinds of nets depending on what I want to put in my 
knowledge soup. But trying to catch crabs with a net designed to catch 
tuna fish is not always a good idea.

Seems to me I have written clearly what I think OWL is good at, and your 
star ontology is a perfect example of that. I use OWL every day since 
2003, I've been following the WebOnt group work. All Mondeca 
applications are built on a backbone ontology expressed in OWL, but 
almost all our industrial applications also include reference thesauri 
and taxonomies expressed in SKOS. And the meta-model of our data base is 
indeed topic-mapppish using associations and roles. All those things in 
their diversity can fit together in their right place in a semantic 
architecture. The same way there is no war between radio-astronomy and 
X-ray astronomy. They capture different aspects of the universe.

As a side note since you are curious about the Topic Maps vs RDF debate, 
there has been a group under W3C umbrella, which delivered a note last year.
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdftm-survey/
So not only they have been speaking together, but they've done it in a 
very productive way. And I remember this conversation being very active 
since at least 2002, with joint meetings in various conferences ...
See also the excellent paper by Lars Marius Garshol at 
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tmrdf

Best

Bernard

Ed Shaya a écrit :
>
> What is new here is that the Topic Mappers and the Ontologists never, 
> to my knowledge, tried to share the same e-forum.  Is this wise?  It 
> sure doesn't seem so.
>
> Ed

-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
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