>There is a big difference between ‘opportunities for reuse’ and ‘reuse’. Reuse is a behavior. The so-called “opportunities” are just resources that could
be reused, but of themselves they are just available resources. A wealth of information doesn’t have a clear relationship to the use of that information, especially since some of it contradicts others. But I think your last >question is the key one:
>> Or, is content present but it is just very difficult to use/re-use?
Ok this distinction between Opportunity for Resources and Reuse Behavior provides a larger frame for discussion.
I must say that I when I first think of reuse I am thinking of content reuse as in the title of Track A "Reusable Semantic Content"
Reuse is dependent on all of the following:
- the content is present (on the Internet/Web)
Yes, this I think of this as a presupposition for Access and accessibility. The content must be discoverable and then accessible.
- the would-be re-user knows that the content is present, i.e., can find it
- the would-be re-user is motivated to find and examine the content
I just observe that if the community makes an effort to store topical ontologies in repositories with good
search capabilities this would make finding a suitable candidate more likely.
- the content is in a form suitable for the planned re-use, or can be “readily” converted to a useful form
What about the idea of generalizing this a bit to include the idea of adapting the content? Converting it
sounds a bit like a rule like transformation and it might be more complicated than that but still useful to do this.
We did have an example from Pascal's Hitzler's presentation (slide 9) Mike Bennett noted that his ODP of Event turned out to be identical to the one in FIBO except we refer to the
concepts of place and time, rather than strings presentation. But then he noted there were more changes needed:
Place need not be spatial - there are events which occur at a virtual place, e.g. a security is issued on the Global Bonds Market.
- the would-be re-user knows how to convert the form, if necessary
- the content is consistent with the micro-theory adopted by the re-user
Yes, I guess that Mike Bennett was matching up micro-theories on event in his comment.
- the re-user is able to determine that the content is consistent with his/her theory
Yes, I guess that we might look for structural consistency which was perhaps handled in the conversion process mentioned previously, the logical consistency (check with a reasoner?)
and consistency with the user's conceptualization.
I am aware of some thought on these from the work of Ljiljana Stojanovic on Ontology evolution.
Methods and Tools for Ontology Evolution. PhD thesis, University of
Karlsruhe, 2004