I would just want to chime in and endorse what others have said -
that this is an EXTREMELY important issue to provide some clarity on
for the community.
Many folks in neuroinformatics, for instance, are interested in
knowing more about the practical issues involved in moving toward an
RDF (and OWL, when appropriate) representation of their data (and/or
web-based APIs), but usually get stuck on two issues related to URIs:
1) how does one translate current references in XML docs (or
databases for that matter) to URIs;
2) once I've figured out '1', what can I expect to get, when while
processing the resulting RDF, I need to go from URI to "real" object
- digital or otherwise.
These two issues alone have created a lot of confusion and may be the
primary issues holding up adoption of RDF - at least in the neuro-
domain.
I would also say the confusion may also be due large to ignorance of
the RDF spec docs. However, there needs to be a more, practical,
specific roadmap for use of URIs than the spec can supplied -
something very much along the lines that Alan is trying work out here
as a result of these discussions.
Cheers,
Bill
On Jun 19, 2006, at 10:31 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
Dereference, in that context, means something different than what I
was using the term for.
They mean that there has to be a definition of the subject and
object in the OWL file or one of the imports.
I was using it to mean, go to the network and do a geturl of the
uri and do something with the results. OWL and RDF doesn't specify
that you do that. That would certainly not work, since most of the
URLs prior to the semantic web don't have RDF or OWL content.
-Alan
On Jun 19, 2006, at 7:03 AM, John Barkley wrote:
According
to:
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#Property and
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_range, subjects and objects of
properties are "instances" of classes which means they dereference.
Presumably, the names we define will be used early on as subjects
and/or
objects of ObjectProperties. Unless the names are only to be
objects in
DatatypeProperties, then they should dereference to their
definitions as an
individual of a class.
Bill Bug
Senior Analyst/Ontological Engineer
Laboratory for Bioimaging & Anatomical Informatics
www.neuroterrain.org
Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy
Drexel University College of Medicine
2900 Queen Lane
Philadelphia, PA 19129
215 991 8430 (ph)
610 457 0443 (mobile)
215 843 9367 (fax)
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