Juan Sequeda wrote:
As anybody considered reusing the DBpedia ontology?
Juan Sequeda, Ph.D Student
Research Assistant
Dept. of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jsequeda <http://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Ejsequeda>
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.juansequeda.com/
Semantic Web in Austin: http://juansequeda.blogspot.com/
On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Richard Cyganiak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
John,
Here's an observation from a bystander ...
On 17 Nov 2008, at 17:17, John Goodwin wrote:
<snip>
This is also a good example of where (IMHO) the domain was
perhaps over specified. For example all sorts of things could
have publishers, and not the ones listed here. I worry that if
you reuse DBpedia "publisher" elsewhere you could get some
undesired inferences.
But are the DBpedia classes *intended* for re-use elsewhere? Or do
they simply express restrictions that apply *within DBpedia*?
I think that in general it is useful to distinguish between two
different kinds of ontologies:
a) Ontologies that express restrictions that are present in a
certain dataset. They simply express what's there in the data. In
this sense, they are like database schemas: If "Publisher" has a
range of "Person", then it means that the publisher *in this
particular dataset* is always a person. That's not an assertion
about the world, it's an assertion about the dataset. These
ontologies are usually not very re-usable.
b) Ontologies that are intended as a "lingua franca" for data
exchange between different applications. They are designed for
broad re-use, and thus usually do not add many restrictions. In
this sense, they are more like controlled vocabularies of terms.
Dublin Core is probably the prototypical example, and FOAF is
another good one. They usually don't allow as many interesting
inferences.
I think that these two kinds of ontologies have very different
requirements. Ontologies that are designed for one of these roles
are quite useless if used for the other job. Ontologies that have
not been designed for either of these two roles usually fail at both.
Richard,
Returning to DBpedia, my impression is that the DBpedia ontology
is intended mostly for the first role. Maybe it should be
understood more as a schema for the DBpedia dataset, and not so
much as a re-usable set of terms for use outside of the Wikipedia
context. (I might be wrong, I was not involved in its creation.)
In a nutshell, YES! This is much much clearer and less problematic than
the generic "ontology" moniker.
DBpedia colleagues: I think we should qualify what currently exists as a
Schema or Data Dictionary for the DBpedia data set (or Data Space) :-)
Kingsley
Richard
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
