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Hi Kingsley,
I just need to clarify a couple of things with regard to those
links:
Naming in the FIBO standard has UpperCamelCase for classes and
lowerCamelCase for properties, as per OWL naming conventions.
Business facing labels are upper and lower case with spaces, to be
human readable (as previously noted, we were never "discussing
matters with a technical audience"). This is exactly what you are
recommending. As far as I can see, the COSMO resource you have
linked to (which is not FIBO!) follows the same convention as we
do, with some minor differences in convention.
IMPORTANT: The two links you have given are not links to FIBO or
to the subsumption tree of any part of FIBO. These links both go
to a re-framing of FIBO concepts within COSMO, including sub-class
assertions which are not part of FIBO and never have been.
I have not yet had the time to look at the COSMO work and comment
on it, but please be aware that FIBO itself is framed within its
own mid level and upper ontologies all the way up to Thing and no
reference is made in the FIBO standard to the COSMO hierarchy of
concepts.
Please can you modify your description of these concepts
accordingly.
Many thanks,
Mike
On 16/12/2014 15:24, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
On
12/16/14 9:19 AM, Mike Bennett wrote:
Hi John,
As it happens, there was a conversation about "Thing" versus
"Entity" on
this very forum at the time I was thinking about what words to
use.
I came down on the side of "Thing" for the following reasons:
1. I wanted to make it explicitly clear to any reader of the
model, that
this was not "Yet Another Data Model" but a model of real
things.
Sometimes it helps to call upon the Ango-Saxon language for
words that
have not been muddied by previous usages. I had previously tried
to
present computationally independent models of concepts without
doing
this, and the result was always that they were reviewed as
though they
were data models. How to make it clear that the model is
intended to be
a model of real things in the world? A new, untainted word was
required.
2. I decided to use the OWL language, against the advice from
many
well-informed folks including yourself, because we needed
something
which was recognized in the technology community and which would
have
tooling going forward, and because the OWL language, having
"Thing" at
the top, made it explicitly clear that it was a model of things
in the
world and not a model of someone's data. So it matched my
instinct to
use the word "Thing" as above.
3. The word "Entity" which you proposed at the time, while more
precisely correct, suffered from the problem which Pat notes in
a later
email, namely that it has a well-worn meaning in the data
modeling
world. The last thing we needed was something that could be
mistaken for
a model of database "entities".
Of course the word "Thing" is often interpreted as being a
concrete,
continuant, independent thing. To get around this, we made sure
that
everything in the model was framed in terms of three sets of
partitions:
Independent Thing / Relative Thing / Mediating Thing; Continuant
Thing /
Occurrent Thing; and Concrete / Abstract. By appending the word
"Thing"
to those, it is hopefully clearer that the term "Thing" at the
top of
the model encompasses all of those, and not simply those things
you can
poke with a stick.
Hi Mike,
Assuming I have the right version, I have a FIBO viewing page [1]
that could assist everyone in this burgeoning debate. Thus far, in
regards to definitions of the *nature* of entities and relations
described by this ontology, I am not seeing the owl:Thing anomaly
[2].
In my experience "Entity" is better than "Thing" especially, when
discussing matters with a technical audience. Personally, an
Ontology should be constructed for an audience that can understand
its technical underpinnings. Alternative approaches always lead to
problems.
An few aesthetic tweak suggestions for FIBO:
1. Class Names should start with upper case and phrases should be
CamelCase
2. Property Names should be in lower case and camelCase re.,
phrases.
The above makes a world of difference, it even aids those who are
encountering ontologies (for the first time) from other realms
e.g., RDBMS and DBMS folks in general.
Links:
[1] http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/8JZYHP -- FIBO overview via
a LInked Data browser
[2] http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/8JZX7W -- FIBO autonomous
agent subsumption tree root .
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