In general, I would encourage people to work on developing a more
sophisticated alignment vocabulary.
At the moment the only such vocabulary that is on the way towards (at least
potential) widespread acceptance is the mapping vocabulary of SKOS [1].
Maybe this vocabulary could become of importance for the LOD community when
it turns out that the quality of the owl:sameAs links between datasets is
too questionable, and that rdfs:seeAlso is too loose?
Of course, the domain and range of these properties as defined in the SKOS
core schema are restricted to skos:Concept at the moment, which discourages
use of these properties for other entities. On the other hand, I already
observed in some other projects that useful RDF properties from SKOS (such
as skos:prefLabel) are also used for entities other than skos:Concepts...
probably not an elegant solution, but at least something to keep in mind.
In the case of classes and properties: what is wrong with
owl:equivalentClass and owl:equivalentProperty for gluing together the LOD
cloud? They don't 'smush' entities together as owl:sameAs does, but the
recent discussion gives the impression that this (meaning: less aggressive
'smushing' of resources) might actually be a positive behaviour.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-reference-20080609/#mapping
Cheers,
Matthias Samwald
Semantic Web Company, Austria // DERI Galway, Ireland
