Hi Marco, all,
We have been using numerical identifiers in OBI, the Ontology for
Biomedical Investigations, and formalized this via the policy Alan
sent out earlier (see http://www.obofoundry.org/id-policy.shtml)
The OWL file is available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi.owl.
You will see that all entities have a numerical URI (individuals,
classes, properties...).
Cheers,
Melanie
On 18-May-11, at 1:50 PM, Marco Neumann wrote:
Michael,
indeed I did not not read Alan's email. I assume he refers to A-Box
identifiers only.
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Michael F Uschold
<usch...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Marco Neumann <marco.neum...@gmail.com
> wrote:
Glenn,
it's not feasible, nor enforceable, nor desirable to develop
ontologies entirely with random URIs as identifiers.
Perhaps you have not seen Alan Ruttenberg's email on this topic. I
think they do exactly this. It was no free lunch, they had a lot of
work to do to make this doable -- in large part because as Glenn
says, the duality of: "machines need to think in ids and people need
to think in names" is not well supported by tools or methodology.
I am of the opinion that local names should indeed be designed with
meaningful names in mind last but not least to improve the ontology
engineering process. Though that said there might be exceptions such
as NLP and ML where automatic tagging and ontology creation with
random URIs can useful, but that's a special use case.
Marco
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:55 PM, glenn mcdonald <gl...@furia.com>
wrote:
I agree wholeheartedly that URIs should be pure identifiers, with no
embedded semantics or assumptions of readability. And I agree with
Kingsley that there's an elephant in the room. I might even agree
with Kingsley about what the elephant is.
But to say it from my point of view: machines need to think in ids,
people need to think in names. The RDF/SPARQL "stack", such as it
is, has not internalized the implications of this duality, and thus
isn't really prepared to support both audiences properly. Almost all
the canonical examples of RDF and SPARQL avoid this issue by using
toy use-cases with semi-human-readable URIs, and/or with literals
where there ought to be nodes. If you try to do a non-trivial
dataset the right way, you'll immediately find that writing the RDF
or the SPARQL by hand is basically intractable. If you try to
produce an human-intelligible user-interface to such data, you'll
find yourself clinging to rdfs:label for dear life, and then
falling, falling, falling...
In fact, there's almost nothing more telling than the fact that
rdfs:label is rdfS! This is in some ways the most fundamental aspect
of human/computer data-interaction, and RDF itself has essentially
nothing to say about it.
--
Marco Neumann
KONA
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--
Michael Uschold, PhD
Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts
LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu
Skype, Twitter: UscholdM
--
Marco Neumann
KONA
Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in
San Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN
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---
Mélanie Courtot
MSFHR/PCIRN trainee, TFL- BCCRC
675 West 10th Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V5Z 1L3, Canada
