David Price wrote:
Hi Hans,
For data, artificial URIs are fine. For classes and properties in an ontology they are not. Even a non-English speaker will have better luck distinguishing PersonOrOrganization vs Organization rather than RDL94950595 vs RDL9459869 when
reviewing an ontology or writing SPARQL. Adding properties as labels useful for presentation in a user interface does nothing wrt the issue I raise.
+1! The function of the ontology is to capture the knowledge of domain experts in a formal language. It is not useful, even to the knowledge engineer, to
use a formal vocabulary of “terms” that suggest nothing to ANY reader. It is true that members of the Indo-European language community would have a difficult time working with an ontology in which all the terms are in Kanji or Arabic, but that is only equally
difficult to working with terms written entirely in Arabic numerals, and in the Kanji or Arabic case at least some knowledge engineers would find it much easier.
[I think part of our facility with recognition of terms, even in a foreign language, is a result of a common intellectual/bio-mechanical process of learning
to read. Whether the underlying system is phonetic or ideographic, the text forms have elements that invoke a combination of intellectual processes in recognizing words. The components of purely numeric symbols have associated intellectual processes that
are more distantly related to language. So the recognition process for digit strings is not intrinsically more difficult; it is just foreign to everyone’s reading experience.
(I must admit, the above is utter amateur guesswork. I have no real knowledge of cognitive science.)]
-Ed
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Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
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