Michael K. Bergman wrote: > Hi All, > > I have gone back to early threads on Longwell and have also been looking > into the Ontology page on the Simile wiki. I also found a very > interesting re-cap from Mark Butler related to the creation of the > skosext (unofficial SKOS extension) from about three years ago > (http://simile.mit.edu/mail/ReadMsg?listId=9&msgId=265), as well as > other interesting teasers. > > I am seeking additional background information about how > ontologies/controlled vocabularies are used in Longwell (for the Concept > facet?).
To be entirely honest with you, not a lot lot of thought went into any of the ontologies that we have created here at SIMILE... I know it sounds weird, but the main reason for Longwell to use ontologies that have a http://simile.mit.edu URI prefix is have short-hand labels for URIs so that the interface looks prettier and more consistent. The project spent a substantial amount of time before I joined (2003-2004) discussing ontologies and their alignments between various datasets while working on the 'art' demo... but it soon began clear that in order to have something to show, we needed to spend more time on doing and less time on arguing. Longwell 1 (written by Mark Butler and polished by Ryan and myself) came out of this need for doing... and as a result our work on ontologies went a little off. Later, when moving the art demo from Longwell1 to Longwell2, I was asked to revisit our early ontological choices for the RDFization of the various datasets we had and to avoid cutting corners this time. That process lead to no new ontologies for Longwell and to nothing substantially different in the way we RDFized the datasets used... but lead to this blog post about the "quality of metadata" that I wrote on my blog: http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/95/ > Any general guidance on the use of subject terms would be very much > appreciated. It seems like much thought must have gone into this a few > years back and I don't want to see us duplicating effort needlessly with > UMBEL. > > Thanks in advance! You should ask Mark, really. I'm the only other person here that ever touched SKOS (when RDFizing the Barton catalog) but I would consider myself a newbie other than a pro in that respect. -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
