Re: [ontolog-forum] doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects]

[David Price <dprice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I think I've commented on this topic previously but will repeat that comment. It aligns with Hassan's thoughts.

The people suggesting that meaningless labels (and in my context that means local names in OWL class/property URIs) seem to ignore the fact that in many scenarios ontologies are software artefacts. Suggesting that the URI for the class person, for example, be http://example.org/ID0390393 rather than http://example.org/OrganizationOntology#Person means that the artefact is nearly unusable in a software system. Imagine writing complex SPARQL queries with nothing but ID930393 and ID9202929 in the class/property names. That SPARQL is then not maintainable software. No domain expert could possibly approve it, no code review participant could follow it and nobody could debug it in any sensible timeframe after the fact. People would be laughed out of the room for suggesting that Java developers use meaningless class/method names, and for me it's very hard to understand why people think that ontologies are anything other than artefacts that are part of a complex software system - and should be managed as such. The issues such as local name clashes can be handled quite easily through the use of namespaces.

Developers are people too - no reason to make their lives unbearable.

Cheers,

David

UK +44 7788 561308

US +1 336 283 0606

On 28 Nov 2012, at 15:27, Hassan Aït-Kaci wrote:

Hello,

All this discussion on meaningful vs. meaningless labels in an ontologies brought back to me the memory of a paper I wrote back in 1982 [!] while a grad student at Penn describing an experiment on what sense a human user is able to make out of an ontology using English labels as opposed to to dummy labels.

What I used then to represent the ontology was Ron Brachman's KL-One and the domain was the description of a Production-Distribution-Inventory optimization system. Subjects (all unfamiliar with the domain) were asked to answer questions regarding the ontology (half of the experiment subjects were presented with meaningfully named nodes, and half with dummy-labeled nodes).

The conclusion of the experiment was, to quote part of my paper's conclusion, that "when entities bear English names, natural language productions are more compact, more "natural", and syntactically more elegant." Descriptions given by the subjects seeing only dummy-labels were verbose, and tended to carry no clear meaning, even with a clearly detailed ontological structure.

Here's the paper: http://www.hassan-ait-kaci.net/pdf/Describing-Knowledge-from-Semantic-Networks.pdf

Cheers,

-hak
--
http://www.hassan-ait-kaci.net/contactme.html
<hak.vcf>
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