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Re: [ontolog-forum] Endurantism and Perdurantism - Re: Some Comments on

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2015 10:46:59 -0400
Message-id: <551FF963.9050700@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 4/4/15 8:49 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
> Dear Matthew, David, and Leo,
>
> MW
>>> By names of types I mean things like pump and valve. Is that
>>> what you mean?
> DP
>> Yes, that's what I mean. There is nothing shared between the
>> two ontologies at all.
> Just look at the very widely used Schema.org.  Their hierarchy
> is growing very large, but all the definitions are in English.
>
> Depending on your point of view, you could call it either
> an underspecified ontology or a systematic terminology.
>
> In fact, some ontologies that had been specified in OWL, such
> as GoodRelations, have been contributed to Schema.org.  But most
> of those ontologies use only a subset of OWL, their detailed
> definitions are mostly stated in English comments, and they
> have very few "upper level" commitments.
John,    (01)

Should "English" be mandated for Ontology construction? What about all 
the non native English speakers that also want to participate in the 
global act of encoding and decoding information, aided by ontologies?    (02)

Key virtue of RDF is the fact that it includes language tags for 
literals. DBpedia has used this capability to make Linked Open Data 
generation multilingual [1].    (03)


>
> DP
>> We have not seen a case yet where two upper ontologies were useful,
>> but I guess that is a possibility.
> MW
>> I'm assuming you happen to have two bits of ontology that are
>> pre-existing and that you want to make use of, that happen
>> to have different upper level ontologies. I haven't come across
>> an example either, but I guess it could happen.
> Again, look at Schema.org.  Its upper level is very underspecified,
> but it's widely used.    (04)

Because it's supported by Google, Microsoft, Yandex, Yahoo!, and 
others.  Do you think for one second that any other entity collection 
could have prescribed such an ontology, and then achieve adoption? The 
same actors (Ghua, Dan Brickely) tried this via the W3C route, and it 
hit expected challenges.    (05)

Schema.org is a very good contribution to the Linked Data ecosystem, it 
pragmatically addresses key problems that stifled the RDF based Ontology 
realm in the past, but its important that we put its success into proper 
context. Basically, underspecification isn't its fundamental virtue. 
It's a combination of underspecification and sponsorship (Google, 
Yahoo!, Microsoft, Yandex, W3C, and others) that's made it successful.    (06)

> Users who share information expressed in
> the categories of Schema.org make no assumptions about a more
> detailed upper level.  Most of them probably have no upper level.    (07)

Yes, but we wouldn't be making that claim right now if it wasn't 
sponsored, as per my comments above :)    (08)


[1] http://dbpedia.org/About -- Note point 2. which covers languages .    (09)

-- 
Regards,    (010)

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog 1: http://kidehen.blogspot.com
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LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen
Personal WebID: http://kingsley.idehen.net/dataspace/person/kidehen#this    (011)

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