SKOS vs OWL (was: Threads)

[Norman Gray]

On 2007 Sep 30, at 15:44, Norman Gray wrote:

> But then you're developing a vocabulary and an ontology both at  
> once, and it's not clear (to me) what work the ontology half is doing.

Reviewing again the recent messages here, I realise Ed and Tony did  
address this.

Ed (2007 September 25):

> 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.

Unfortunately, I think that cake would be fattening, and not  
particularly nourishing.

The mechanism I'd propose for creating vocabularies would be to  
simply create SKOS normalisations of existing vocabularies (IAU, A&A,  
and so on); thus the SKOS would be created by scripts semi- 
mechanically, removing the need for editors or diagrams.

Tony (2007 September 27), specifically addressing the acceleration/ 
kinematics issue:

> So we have ontological classes
> vont:acceleration and vont:kinematics which each has vont:definedBy
> relationships to vocab:acceleration and vocab:kinematics [...]  
> existing
> within their own hierarchies [...] but accessible from the same  
> structure so that
> vocab-based and ontology-based lookups can happen with the same  
> object (and
> across structures where appropriate)

It's certainly true that, if there were work to be done to create an  
ontology of this type, then it would be natural to make links to the  
corresponding vocabulary.  But that doesn't mean you'd have to do  
both jobs simultaneously: (a) the appearance of both vont:Star and  
vocab:Star would be confusing to anyone coming to this fresh, who'd  
have to be told the whole Concept vs. Class vs. instance story, and  
(b) OWL is just _bigger_, in its conceptual baggage, in its defining  
documents, and in its applications.

In both cases, I don't believe the OWL aspect comes for free (contra  
Ed), and I don't see the requirements that oblige us to bear the  
cost.  Though I'd be interested to be proved wrong.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK