As anybody considered reusing the DBpedia ontology? Juan Sequeda, Ph.D Student
Research Assistant Dept. of Computer Sciences The University of Texas at Austin http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jsequeda [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.juansequeda.com/ Semantic Web in Austin: http://juansequeda.blogspot.com/ On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Richard Cyganiak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > > John, > > Here's an observation from a bystander ... > > On 17 Nov 2008, at 17:17, John Goodwin wrote: > <snip> > >> This is also a good example of where (IMHO) the domain was perhaps over >> specified. For example all sorts of things could have publishers, and not >> the ones listed here. I worry that if you reuse DBpedia "publisher" >> elsewhere you could get some undesired inferences. >> > > But are the DBpedia classes *intended* for re-use elsewhere? Or do they > simply express restrictions that apply *within DBpedia*? > > I think that in general it is useful to distinguish between two different > kinds of ontologies: > > a) Ontologies that express restrictions that are present in a certain > dataset. They simply express what's there in the data. In this sense, they > are like database schemas: If "Publisher" has a range of "Person", then it > means that the publisher *in this particular dataset* is always a person. > That's not an assertion about the world, it's an assertion about the > dataset. These ontologies are usually not very re-usable. > > b) Ontologies that are intended as a "lingua franca" for data exchange > between different applications. They are designed for broad re-use, and thus > usually do not add many restrictions. In this sense, they are more like > controlled vocabularies of terms. Dublin Core is probably the prototypical > example, and FOAF is another good one. They usually don't allow as many > interesting inferences. > > I think that these two kinds of ontologies have very different > requirements. Ontologies that are designed for one of these roles are quite > useless if used for the other job. Ontologies that have not been designed > for either of these two roles usually fail at both. > > Returning to DBpedia, my impression is that the DBpedia ontology is > intended mostly for the first role. Maybe it should be understood more as a > schema for the DBpedia dataset, and not so much as a re-usable set of terms > for use outside of the Wikipedia context. (I might be wrong, I was not > involved in its creation.) > > Richard >
