Re: [ontology-summit] [ReusableContent] Partitioning the problem

[Ali SH <asaegyn+out@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Amanda, Kingsley and David,

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Amanda Vizedom <amanda.vizedom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Your proposed solution - as best I can tell, to choose one target set of humans and make the (meant for machine consumption) URIs (or even names!) understandable to them, while ignoring the polysemy-tolerant, built-for-natural-language labeling features of the ontology language, is inherently antithetical to reuse (including use over time). 

I don't believe David is saying this. I sympathize with his conundrum. He isn't saying that the human readable URI's are intended to exactly denote the semantics of what is represented in the ontology.  Rather, that people who are using these URI's to build applications, in the form of code or queries riding on top of the ontologies have more difficulty if they are anchored in a completely opaque naming system.

His example with the SPARQL queries is spot on, and something I've run into as well. When queries are written using completely opaque URI's, the task of maintaining, debugging and updating them is significantly complicated, leading to more opportunities for errors.

If I've understood David's point correctly -- the same way that software developers employ useful NL analogues for the variable / class names to make the code more readable, ontologists should consider using similarly somewhat accessible labels. As someone who has had to debug SPARQL queries written using esoteric naming systems, the fact that those terms had "pref-labels" in a multitude of language did not help one iota. I had to constantly look up what the term referred, and it increased the debugging time by perhaps an order of magnitude.

As I suggested in a previous email, there's a balance to be struck, since a pure linguistic ID can indeed lead to unintended or hopeful semantics. But something like:

human.n.05

is readable to a human, and also clearly not intended to be interpreted naiively. One can still use labels (a la SKOS) to display different terms (e.g. homme) when presenting such concepts to SME's or other targeted audiences, but when one is building applications using the ontology identifiers, having something like human.n.05 vs RD54383 is much easier to follow the logic and debug.

As Simon and Ed alluded to, our brains have developed ways for holding various referents in our heads. We detect and utilize name patterns based on the shape and length of words. When the naming system follows an esoteric style, we don't have the ability to use these facilities, leading to potential errors and slower work.

--


(•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,.,

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