Hi, So, what we are doing is establishing the relationships between people and organizations from a set of court cases where slaves sued for their freedom. Those interested can get a bit more information here: http://digital.wustl.edu/legalencodingproject/about.html. We're interested in people's roles in the court cases, but also their roles society and the organizations to which they belong.
Our ontology will either be based of CIDOC-CRM or it will be based off some CIDOC concepts combined with some FOAF concepts. Optimally, I'd like to only use CIDOC if possible. To do that though, is it best to include all of the classes which a concept belongs to? For instance, I will use the class "person". Is it necessary to include the super classes of "Actor" "Persistent Item" and "CRM Entity"? Best, Tim -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Alexander Johannesen Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 4:08 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Ontology Question Hiya, > Is it okay to just use the classes I need or should I include the super > classes which they belong to? I think we also need to define a few concepts here. What do you mean, "include"? As far as I can tell, you want to say something like "Here's a few concepts we're using, and their definition is based off this other ontology over *there* (pointing)", but that's not always the case, so just asking. Now, Karen is of course right in her take on it, but there's a little thing that require a bit of focus, and that's how this new ontology is going to be used. Is it one of these manual labour things where it doesn't actually require formal definitions as much as a human one, or is it (however you use the ontology) to be passed through a tool, or more formally passed through an inferencer? Regards, Alex -- Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps --- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ---------------------------------------------- ------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---
