Re: [ontolog-forum] vocabulary tools/knoodl

["Hudson, Michael J (IT)" <Mike.Hudson@xxxxxxx>]

I would only note that RDF is not by nature an XML language.  Its been forced into that format and you generally see it in that format... but it's not an XML language and its not a hierarchical language like XML.   N3 or Turtle formats are the more straight forward and most natural ways of expressing RDF statements.

 

As to the second statement, RDF does currently lack reification, and that would solve most problems people have with the subject-predicate-object notation.  However, most statements including addition can be expressed in RDF, though it may take more than one statement, which is fine.   RDF (or XML) is not meant to be easy for humans to read as straight RDF.  Easy enough to understand and/or edit a document in its native format, if need be... but its meant to be processed and visualized in some manner.   RDF is a graph/network format and thus usually easier to understand visually as a graph.

 

OWL, as RDF's ontology language, isn't as complete as other ontological languages.  But its goal, like XML, was to be simple so as to get more people, specifically non-ontological experts into the mix.   Before XML, only the SGML gurus knew how to parse through the SGML specs to come up with valid documents.   XML doesn't have all the features of SGML, but has enough that it satisfies most people's needs.   The same goes with RDF and OWL.

 

Knoodl, btw, is a wiki that expresses any new vocabulary or ontological concept as a wiki web page.  You never see the RDF or OWL if you don't want to.  However, if you need to formalize it as RDF/OWL, you can... and thus... you can write applications that systematically use whatever vocabulary or ontology you've created and colloborated on.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michael J. Hudson

Northrop Grumman TASC

Computer Systems Architect V

Mike.Hudson@xxxxxxx

(w)703-547-6945

---

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of John F. Sowa
Sent: Tue 1/20/2009 9:57 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] vocabulary tools/knoodl

Paola,

You don't ever want to "accomplish some rdfization of vocabularies."

The best notation for defining things is a version controlled
English that enables the subject-matter experts to think in
the terms that are appropriate to the subject.  The result
is humanly readable.

Following is an excerpt from a note to Ian Bailey in another
thread.

John
____________________________________________________________________

IB> Another tip is to sort out your ontic categories early on. I'm
 > not sure OWL and RDFS give you a proper foundation for ontology
 > development - there are some very strange things in the W3C spec
 > about how an individual in one ontology can be a class in another
 > (bizarre even in an intensional approach).

I very strongly agree.  RDFS and OWL are horrible examples of how
*not* to design an ontology language.  The designers started with
two disastrous implementation-based assumptions:

  1. They wanted to reuse their XML-based parsing tools by forcing
     everything into the world's worst syntax.

  2. They forced a weird semantics in which the only relations
     are dyadic.  That means that you can't even say 2+2=4
     because the "+" operator is triadic:  it takes two inputs
     and generates one output.

These two blunders are the source of those bizarre features you
mention above.  You can't entirely ignore RDF and OWL because
they were foisted on a large set of people who didn't know enough
to see that they were dupes in a Ponzi scheme.  But you should
always preserve your sanity by thinking in terms of something
better.


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