[tdwg-tag] Part-of in RDF/OWL

[Bob Morris]

Several unintend double negatives and other misuses in my reply
reverse my meaning and/or cast doubt on my command of English ... :-(
"Hilmar might be able to through some insight on the matter." -->
[...] to throw some insight"
"signals that insufficient use-case modelling has not been done"
--"signals that insufficient [...] has been done"


On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Bob Morris <morris.bob at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but...
>
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> We are seeking advice in the context of using semantic mediawiki to
>> document terms, at present as an example the taxpub vocabularly, which
>> ontology to use to document the following:
>>
>> 1. generic part-of relations of concepts.
>> Example: the taxpub nomenclature section is part of the taxpub treatment
>> We consider using DublinCore for this. We found nothing in SKOS for this.
>>
>> 2. part of relations of things
>> both petal and sepal are part of the corolla.
>>
>> Bob Morris recommends the ro ontology: http://obofoundry.org/ro/
>> However, this one says that it is undergoing strong changes in the
>> near future.
>
> Well, I don't know what "near" means for their future, but the
> discussion of it petered out over 15 months ago. A very brief glance
> at that indicates that the initial impetus was mainly to refactor RO,
> although the discussion seems to raise other points also.  Hilmar
> might be able to through some insight on the matter.
>>
>> 3. When documenting legacy xml ontologies, the xml variant requires
>> documenting a difference between element and attribute children.
>>
>> How to express this in RDF form? ("why would you want do that" -> Bob
>> Morris likes to answer that, but in fact we just want to have an
>> orthogonal form to simplify things).
>
> Ah, you slightly mis-state my underlying point. I (hope I am) famous
> for often saying that questions that begin with "Why would anybody
> ever want to") are forbidden to software engineers, and by extension
> to ontology engineers. But (when prompted) I always point out that
> this is a mantra to guard against two things, depending on the state
> of development:
>
> (a) When bleated, sheeplike, by programmers whose code crashed
> gracelessly by users who do something unexpected, it almost always
> signals that the code contains an implicit, unexamined, assumption
> that a certain use case would never appear.
> (b) Before development it often  signals that insufficient use-case
> modelling has not been done. So in this case, I literally mean that
> one needs a clear requirement for modelling the syntax of XML in a
> semantic modeling language. Phrased that way, I would worry that the
> impedance mismatches between a set of XML constraints on a document's
> structure and a set of RDF descriptions of the content of the document
> might be very high.
>>
>> Any help or insight is appreciated.
>>
>> Gregor
>>
>> --
>> ---------------------------------
>> Dr. G. Hagedorn
>> +49-(0)30-8304 2220 (work)
>> +49-(0)30-831 5785 (private)
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorhagedorn
>>
>> This communication (including all attachments) is sent on a personal
>> basis. It is intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed.
>> Redistributing or publishing it without permission is a violation of
>> privacy rights and copyright.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Robert A. Morris
>
> Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
> UMASS-Boston
> 100 Morrissey Blvd
> Boston, MA 02125-3390
> IT Staff
> Filtered Push Project
> Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
> Harvard University
>
>
> email: morris.bob at gmail.com
> web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
> web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
> http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
> phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)
>



-- 
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
IT Staff
Filtered Push Project
Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University


email: morris.bob at gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)