Matthias Samwald wrote:
One feedback I got for the SenseLab conversion note
(http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/senselab/) was that it might be
inappropriate to mention that flaws in certain popular open source
ontology editors caused problems for our work. To portions of text in
question are:
I absolutely think it *is* appropriate to mention it. People takes
criticisms too personally, which is not good for the health of science.
Truth should be gained through intelligent but authoritarian debate .
"""
We experienced the following problems while using RDF/OWL:
The open-source ontology editors used for this project were relatively
unreliable. A lot of time was spent with steering around software bugs
that caused instability of the software and errors in the generated
RDF/OWL. Future versions of freely available editors or currently
available commercial ontology editors might be preferable. [...]
"""
and
"""
We experienced clear benefits from using Semantic Web technologies for
the integration of SenseLab data with other neuroscientific data in a
consistent, flexible and decentralised manner. The main obstacle in
our work was the lack of mature and scalable open source software for
editing the complex, expressive ontologies we were dealing with. Since
the quality of these tools is rapidly improving, this will cease to be
an issue in the near future.
"""
In my opinion, the errors in one of the most popular OWL ontology
editors were problematic enough that they need to be mentioned -- I
guess most people working with non-trivial OWL ontologies know what I
mean. What do you think?
Do it. I definitely think it should. In fact, the more popular an
ontology, the more stentorian the criticism should be because the
potential damage a popular ontology can do is much more than a less
popular one. The problem is the critics but those who is being
criticized. They should take criticism as constructive advise to
improve their work but as destructive sense to take them out of their job.
Xiaoshu
