Vocab AND Ontology?

[Ed Shaya]

Bernard,

   SKOS and OWL are already both RDF.  They are both triplet stores of 
statements.  As far as format goes, they are nearly identical.  As you 
point out, one can pull in skos into SWOOP or use my skos.owl OR you can 
take a skos document and add:

<owl:ontology rdf:about="">
</owl>

Then add a few more xlmns= lines, and it becomes both an OWL document 
and a skos document, which means that you can use all of the owl editors 
and diagramming tools.    I think this goes under the category of having 
your cake and eating too.

If you want to stick to strict skos (with those two lines in), that is 
fine.  You will have a bicycle made by Ferrari. But, I just note that if 
you also then use the owl:subClassOf or rdfs:subClassOf where 
appropriate then the diagrams will show this structure nicely and it 
will be more precise.  You will have a bicycle that goes as fast as a 
Ferrari.

Or just do it in SKOS.  In either case, you will eat fish.

Ed


Bernard Vatant wrote:
> 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
> 
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