[tdwg-content] class design, generalization, L(O)D

Thomas Bandholtz thomas.bandholtz at innoq.com
Tue Nov 16 20:08:47 CET 2010


Hi,

I am one of those who like SKOS quite well, and I wrote an early draft
of expressing Darwin Core taxonomies based on SKOS.
You can see it here: http://www.w3.org/egov/wiki/Linked_Environment_Data
I had some discussion with Roger Hyam about it in August, and he seemed
to like it quite well.

It realy is a very early draft, and you should be familiar with SKOS for
a full understanding.
May be the samples are quite expressive by themselves, anyway.

Thomas


Am 15.11.2010 23:18, schrieb Peter DeVries:
> * I originally replied to Bob's post in tdwg-tag,  not tdwg-content
>
> It is interesting that Jonathan Reese sees the semantic web and the
> LOD cloud in a different way that Tim Berners-Lee.
>
> The issue with LOD semantics is being worked out on the public-lod list.
>
> With the exception of some of the LOD services that do inferencing on
> cloud data, all inferencing is currently done on one machine with all
> the relevant data loaded.
>
> If you don't like SKOS or some other problematic ontology entailment
> you can simply:
>
> 1) Use a modified version of SKOS for your own inferencing.
>
> Also it would be interesting to see some real world inferencing using
> a data set markup in the current DarwinCore that demonstrates:
>
> 1) That it works
> 2) That it works in a useful way
>
> So in addition to failing to work within the standards of the larger
> informatics community TDWG*, is failing to demonstrate that it has a
> working, useful standard.
>
> Pointing out potential problems with SKOS etc. does not demonstrate
> that you have anything better.
>
> If the opinions of the real experts in the semantic web community
> matter then you might want to consider what they think of my work.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> - Pete
>
> * It is welcome news to me that TDWG is now going to follow the advice
> of the semantic web community
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob at gmail.com
> <mailto:morris.bob at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I sent this to tdwg-tag instead of this more appropriate list.  My
>     apologies to those who see it twice, along with any replies to it.
>
>     Jonathan Reese, an employee of the Science Commons and TDWG member
>     (and who knows way more about semantic web than I do) recently sent me
>     this. I copy it here with his permission. Each of the paragraphs seems
>     to me to be germane in different ways to the discussions about what
>     should be an Individual. For those not deep into RDF, for the word
>     "axiom", you could loosely understand "rule", although that term also
>     has technical meaning that is sometimes a little different. Jonathan
>     raises an important use case in the second paragraph, which is data
>     quality control.  That's a topic of interest to many, but especially
>     those following the new Annotation Interest Group. Originally, this
>     was part of a discussion we had about my favorite hobby horse,
>     rdfs:domain.  He is not on my side.  When people who know more than I
>     do about something are skeptical of my arguments about it, I usually
>     suspend disbelief and temporarily adopt their position.
>
>     Jonathan's first point is pretty much what Paul Murray observed
>     yesterday in response to a question of Kevin Richards.
>
>
>     "(a) subclassing is the way in RDFS or OWL you would connect the more
>     specific to the less specific, so that you can apply general theorems
>     to a more specific entity.  That is, a well-documented data set would
>     be rendered using classes and properties that were very specific so as
>     to not lose information, and then could be merged with a
>     badly-documented data set by relaxing to more general classes and
>     properties using subclass and subproperty knowledge.
>
>     (b) axioms (i.e. specificity) are valuable not only for expressing
>     operational and inferential semantics, but also for "sanity checking"
>     e.g. consistency, satisfiability, Clark/Parsia integrity checks (
>     http://clarkparsia.com/pellet/icv/ ), and similar. Being able to
>     detect ill-formed inputs is incredibly valuable.
>
>     People talk past one another because there are many distinct use cases
>     for RDF and assumptions are rarely surfaced. For L(O)D, you're
>     interested in making lots of links with little effort. Semantics is
>     the enemy because it drives up costs. For semantic web, on the other
>     hand, you're interested in semantics, i.e. understanding and
>     documenting the import of what's asserted and making a best effort to
>     only assert things that are true, even in the presence of open world
>     assumption and data set extensibility. Semantics is expensive because
>     it requires real thought and often a lot of reverse engineering.
>     People coming from these two places will never be able to get along."
>     ---Jonathan Rees in email to Bob Morris
>     ================
>
>
>     Bob Morris
>
>     --
>
>     --
>     Robert A. Morris
>     Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
>     UMASS-Boston
>     100 Morrissey Blvd
>     Boston, MA 02125-3390
>     Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
>     email: morris.bob at gmail.com <mailto:morris.bob at gmail.com>
>     web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/
>     web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
>     http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram <http://www.cs.umb.edu/%7Eram>
>     phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete DeVries
> Department of Entomology
> University of Wisconsin - Madison
> 445 Russell Laboratories
> 1630 Linden Drive
> Madison, WI 53706
> TaxonConcept Knowledge Base <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> /
> GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://lod.geospecies.org/>
> About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base <http://about.geospecies.org/>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
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-- 
Thomas Bandholtz, thomas.bandholtz at innoq.com, http://www.innoq.com 
innoQ Deutschland GmbH, Halskestr. 17, D-40880 Ratingen, Germany
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