RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

[Kashyap, Vipul]

Title: RE: Ontology editor + why RDF?

I think RDFS and RDFS+a few OWL constructs are as much (if not more) Semantic Web than a standalone ontology even if it is in OWL...   [VK] This is an interesting discussion which we have been having in the BIORDF group and I approach this issue from the perspective of what is the value proposition of SW technologies.   If we take a relational table, an XML schema or a thesaurus and just move it over to RDF as-it-is, then we haven’t added “new” semantics to the information… all we have is the original information in the relational table/XML/thesaurus now represented in RDF..   When you try to sell the concept of RDF, etc. to an IT shop, they will ask: what do we gain by moving to RDF, when what you are representing is already represented using existing data formats/models?   So representing something RDF+RDF(S) may be technically viewed as the Semantic Web, but unless we are clearly able to demonstrate the value proposition of doing so in terms what is the “extra semantics” being added, it will be a tough task to convince IT folks to adopt SW technologies..    THat said, the benefit of having vocabularies in SKOS, and using the linking of the Semantic Web is that then richer models (in OWL) can be tied to terms in the ontology, and that will provide a lot of new functionality...   but the key is that ontologies published on the Semantic Web (i.e. in RDF so that there is a URI for each term) have a lot of power as yet unexplored, and provide a way to incrementally add the power of OWL, without having to take the whole thing into OWL in one fell swoop (if you'll pardon the pun).  A thesaurus of the size of the one that Anita describes would be very expensive to port to OWL in one shot - but the port to SKOS is easy, and then in the same, or different, document richer semantics can be added - and that is new to KR, since incrementality of this kind (via multiple rich subsets linked to a a single thesaurus) has not been explored in the traditional KR&R space, certainly not "in the wild" where search engines and the like can also b involved... but then, I guess I have a vision for this stuff that isn't quite the same as many people's these days -- my blog entry at [1] is a short description of some of this...   [VK] As I mentioned in my previous e-mail, I actually agree with the value proposition mentioned above. However, URI-based linking is IMHO achieved by deploying a web infrastructure. The value proposition of a semantic web infrastructure is in the ability to introduce new semantics into the picture.   Another point of agreement is introducing these things incrementally is the right approach. Having a clear idea of how or what kind of richer semantics can be added and what value it brings needs to be characterized clearly to get buy in….         [1] https://www.mindswap.org/blog/2006/01/26/thnking-about-the-semantic-web/ -- Professor James Hendler                   Director Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery                 301-405-2696 UMIACS, Univ of Maryland                    301-314-9734 (Fax) College Park, MD 20742                        http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler  Web Log: http://www.mindswap.org/blog/author/hendler