Ed, (01)
You need to look at SKOS as a thesaurus, i.e., lexical modeling language. Like
WordNet, another thesaurus to my mind, the synsets are the "rough concepts"
which get mapped (more or less) to your ontology concepts expressed (if
inadequately) in OWL/RDF. SKOS is a vocabulary modeling language; OWL in an
ontology modeling language. I say this, even though we all know that the
description logic representation of OWL will not satisfy FOL or HOL folks. Hey,
you start somewhere. When you need more expressivity, you add it. That's what
we do. (02)
Thanks,
Leo (03)
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Barkmeyer, Edward J
>Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 6:18 PM
>To: [ontolog-forum]
>Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects]
>
>Leo wrote:
>________________________________________
>From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [ontolog-forum-
>bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Obrst, Leo J. [lobrst@xxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:33 PM
>To: [ontolog-forum]
>Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects]
>
>Actually, if you look at SKOS, it was intended to represent (structured)
>vocabularies which could then easily be mapped to ontologies.
>
>[EJB] Easily mapped to very weak ontologies. The SKOS notion of
>'broader/narrower concept' isn't necessarily ontological subsumption.
>
>The simple way people use SKOS is to import SKOS and then use
>skos:altLabel for synonyms for the ontology concept name represented in
>OWL/RDF.
>
>[EJB] Yes. This is a useful practice.
>
>A gensymed name for an ontology class is simply a URI without any human
>words! I suggest you have a canonical name (it's just a label) for an ontology
>concept, but use vocabularies to map to that name, because in fact
>ontologists (at least most of them so far) are humans using human
>language, and "x23892" is not as good as "Person".
>
>The non-ontologists will be confused, of course, but they currently confuse
>terms with concepts,
>
>[EJB] To quote from SBVR, there are two 'reference schemes' (means of
>identifying individuals) for the concept 'concept': a term and a definition.
>You have to associate one or the other or both with the magic URI when you
>create it; otherwise it has no semantics. The SBVR copout for providing only
>a term is to say: When no definition is provided, the common
>understanding, as evidenced by the NODE definition, for example, is
>intended. The problem here is that there are primitive concepts in any
>ontology, and there is reliance on the term and "common understanding",
>intuition, or on a definition that is not definitive: a set of necessary and
>sufficient conditions.
>
>and think that they don't need semantics because their column name or
>XML Schema entity is labeled Person, and of course everyone knows what
>that means.
>
>[EJB] Well, the audience would probably be hard-pressed to understand a
>formal definition of 'person', in that the definition will introduce a larger
>set
>of terms for which they have no intuition.
>
> I.e., they don't understand semantics, let alone ontology. Constructs in
>structural models such as relational databases, XML schemas, UML models
>are vocabularies.
>
>[EJB] I fully agree. But I have to say that the same is true of most OWL
>models. Many, if not most, of the concepts are 'primitive', and the set of
>necessary properties is rarely sufficient to characterize the thing, or if it
>is,
>then most of those properties are primitive. It seems to me that all of our
>formal power notwithstanding, domain ontologies are not like mathematics.
>There is not a small fundamental set of primitive concepts from which a
>whole theory can be axiomatically constructed. A typical domain ontology
>has a few hundred concepts, and about half of them are at most partly
>characterized axiomatically. All the rest appeals to common understanding
>of the term used for the concept, or to the common understanding of the
>terms used in the NL definitions ("annotations").
>
>[EJB] Further, I would argue that common upper ontologies are useful only as
>contributing partial characterizations of classes, and almost completely
>useless in characterizing properties. What you do get by subtyping an upper
>ontology concept is a set of axioms that do apply to the concept at hand -- a
>set of necessary characteristics that are not sufficient for anything but the
>high-level abstracton -- and will be useful to your reasoner.
>
>In addition, it gets even more complicated, i.e., the vocabulary/ontology
>issue, in that many times other vocabularies need to be captured, i.e., a
>purchaser of some type (a technical purchaser) refers to a product as X,
>whereas a purchaser of another type (a non-technical purchasing agent)
>refers to it as Y, and a customer may similarly have different types
>(technical,
>non-technical), say for engineering products. So really what you need is a
>vocabulary, a context of use, and the ontology.
>
>[EJB] There is the famous tale of the chemical plant in which there were two
>colors of coverall: the yellow ones were for everyday protection, the blue
>ones were vapor-proof, to be used in case of hazardous leaks and spills. Of
>course, the operators all knew the importance of the color, and of course
>they referred to the vapor-proof coveralls as "blue suits". There came a day
>when a new purchasing agent was directed to acquire a new batch of "blue
>suits" and acquired ordinary coveralls that were dyed blue. 4 operators were
>burned but no one was killed.
>
>At VerticalNet (business-to-business e-commerce) in 2000 we had this issue,
>but never resolved it before we went out of business. Domain sales directors
>would see ontology class labels and say "that's not right, we don't use that
>term", mistaking vocabulary for concept. EVERY application indeed uses (or
>could) its own vocabulary, depending on the nature of the application and its
>interface. So we distinguished "presentation" from "representation".
>Presentation varies radically, but representation less so (you do have to
>capture the filagrees of meaning in your ontologies, but how you refer to
>those "nodes" is relatively independent).
>
>[EJB] Yes! We have, however, run into a serious problem in this area, in
>which the standard XML tag cannot be interpreted by even senior software
>engineers if it isn't the term used by his organization. One of the OAG
>specifications has, in the annotations in the schema, a list of synonymous
>terms used in various companies in the industry, hoping that one of them
>will trigger the correct response. But often it triggers the reaction that
>these
>terms identify multiple somewhat different concepts ("filagrees") to the
>same readers. This problem, however, filters into the literature of the field
>as well, which means it is not restricted to knowledge engineering and data
>exchange.
>
>[EJB] As Eliot Kinder, one of the Hypertext gurus, once put it: "It all comes
>down to people talking to people, no matter how much cool technology we
>throw at it."
>
>Thanks,
>Leo
>
>
>--
>Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
>National Institute of Standards & Technology
>Engineering Laboratory -- Systems Integration Division
>100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Office: +1 301-975-3528
>Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 Mobile: +1 240-672-5800
>
>From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andries van Renssen
>Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 8:30 AM
>To: '[ontolog-forum] '
>Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] doing standards [was - Re: Webby objects]
>
>Leo, Doug, Amanda,
>Separating NL vocabularies from Ontology terms is one option, but IMHO
>not the best one.
>Creating a separate Ontologies language that only maps to NL terms
>unnecessarily isolates the ontology world from the application world.
>There are solutions to solve synonym and homonym management and use
>without such a separation.
>
>Andries
>
>On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 5:22 PM, doug foxvog
><doug@xxxxxxxxxx<mailto:doug@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>On Thu, November 22, 2012 16:59, Obrst, Leo J. wrote:
>> Sure, Amanda, and that's why I (and we) advocate using natural
>> language vocabularies that are linked/mapped to ontologies.
>If you are referring to advocating the separation of NL vocabularies from
>ontology term names, we certainly agree. The ontology needs to express
>an N-N mapping between NL terms and ontology terms.
>
>> This was a hard lesson
>> learned (initially, by others, before my time) in the DoD in the early
>> 1990s, and that I personally experienced in the metadata wars of the
>> 2000s, where people will fight to the death to include their "words",
>> mistaking these for the concepts behind them.*
>
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