I think we should be taking a
hard look at Bob Kahn’s ideas of the Handle System. Take a look at
http://www.doregistry.org. His idea of
handles bypasses URLs and DNS and provides a clean resolution system at the
object level, which would appear to work nicely with ontologies, and pieces of
ontologies. One would still have to ensure a clean configuration management
system ran on top of it all.
-
Steve
From: oor-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oor-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Obrst, Leo J.
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 2:32 PM
To: OpenOntologyRepository-discussion
Subject: [oor-forum] FW: URIs and Unique IDs
I’m cross-posting this. Versioning is definitely an issue
we need to address for OOR, and though we may derive our methods from others,
we should certainly consider the ramifications now.
Leo
_____________________________________________
Dr.
Leo Obrst The MITRE Corporation,
Information Semantics
lobrst@xxxxxxxxx
Information Discovery & Understanding, Command and Control Center
Voice: 703-983-6770 7515 Colshire
Drive, M/S H305
Fax:
703-983-1379 McLean, VA 22102-7508, USA
From: semantic-web-request@xxxxxx
[mailto:semantic-web-request@xxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael F Uschold
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 5:15 AM
To: semantic-web@xxxxxx
Cc: aldo.gangemi@xxxxxxxxx; Conor Shankey; Peter Mika; Ora Lassila; Pan, Dr Jeff Z.; Tim Berners-Lee; Frank van Harmelen; sean.bechhofer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: URIs and Unique IDs
I'm resending this message to the semantic web
discussion group for the record.
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 3:53 PM,
Michael F Uschold <uschold@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Currently there is no accepted
practice on how/whether to migrate to new URIs when a new version of an
ontology is published. This is largely due to the fact that there is no good
technology for managing versioning, and the W3C consciously (and probably
sensibly) decided not to address the issue. Versioning information is
meant to be placed on a version annotation.
However the current situation is like the wild West, and everyone will be doing
different things, resulting in a mess.
Wordnet published a new version and minted all new
URIs even though many or most of the entries were semantically identical.
The SKOS working group is currently considering the pros and cons of various
options. One is to adopt all new URIs in a new namespace, just like Wordnet. Another is to keep the exact same name space, and
change the semantics of a small number of terms while keeping the same URI. A
third is to keep the same URI for the unchanged terms, and mint new URIs for
the terms with different semantics.
This is a problem because they have no guidelines, they are basically stumbling
along in the dark.
I believe that this is an urgent matter that needs attention to prevent a
nightmare from unfolding.
In the current state of semantic web use, it may not matter to much what choice
the SKOS team chooses. This is mainly relatively few applications will be
impacted, which may be due to the fact that the applications are not driven by
the ontologies.
However, when usage of ontologies and ontology-driven applications becomes more
mainstream, the differences could be profound. Given that this issue is
intimately tied up with versioning, and that we have no good solutions yet, do
we continue to throw our hands up and punt? Absolutely not, it is essential
that a good precedent is set ASAP that is based on sound principles.
Here is how.
We should imagine a future where ontology versioning is handled properly and do
things that are going to make things easy to migrate to that future. We don't
know how the versioning black box will work, but we should be able to make some
clear and definitive statements about WHAT it does.
For example, in the future, ontology-driven applications will be fairly
mainstream. URIs are used as unique identifiers. When applications are driven
from ontologies, then they will break if you change the semantics in
mid-stream. Imagine an application that relied on the semantics of
broader as it was originally specified with transitivity. They loaded
data that was created using that semantics. Then the SKOS spec changes and
broader is no longer transitive. New datasets are created according to this new
meaning. The application loads more data. It needs to know which data is
subject to transitive closure and which is not. This is impossible, if the same
SKOS URI is used for versions with different semantics. They are
different beasts, and thus MUST have different URIs.
Similarly, if SKOS mints a whole new namespace and changes all the URIs, the
application also has a problem. It has datasets with the old URI and datasets
with the new URIs. This means that the datasets will not be linked like they
should, they will treat the two different URIs for the same thing as being
different. If one wanted to go into OWL-Full, one can use owl:sameAs, but this is not very practical. The only
reasonable solution is to have the same URI for things with the same semantics.
Thus, any ontology versioning systemof the future
will rely on these two principles:
1. If the semantics of a term changes, then it needs to have a new unique ID.
2. If the semantics of a term does NOT change, then it should maintain the same
ID in any future versions.
If either of these two guidelines are broken, then so will the ontology-driven
applications of the future.
These maxims hold without exception for any standards that are formally
released as standards.
A question arises if we need to hold to the same standards for standards like
SKOS which was never formally blessed.
The practical difficulties will be the same whether the standard is blessed or
not. It only really depends on whether the standard is a de facto standard,or whether it is getting significant use. If users
build things and ontology producers break things through carelessness, this
will hinder semantic web technology adoption.
Another question is what to do if the original standard is belived
to be incorrect, and the new one is the fixed one. Can one then keep the same
URI?
Again, the answer should be informed by the impact on applications. The same
problems will occur if you change the semantics and keep the same URI even if
you are fixing a mistake. The URI with the wrong semantics must keep its
original unique ID.
Michael Uschold
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