Re: How to find a proper ontology for my classes and properties?

On 10/30/2010 10:40 AM, Juriy Katkov wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> I have 2 questions about rdf data.
>
> 1. Suppose I started describing something in triples and I want to use a
> property 'hasOwner'. I understand that it's much better to use this
> property from one of the existing ontologies rather than use property
> from my own namespace.
> The question is: what is the easyest and the most right way to search
> for this property? I know, there is Swoogle and sometimes it helps me
> with that. I wonder if there is something better that fulltext search.

There've been some great suggestions on this thread, but allow me to 
offer the viewpoint that in many cases trying to find a predicate to 
reuse is not worth the effort.

The main goal of reuse is to allow your data to be consumed by software 
tools that already know how to interpret an existing vocabulary. If 
that's the case for your domain then great, it makes a lot of sense to 
reuse the predicate. If that's not the case, or if you don't know if 
it's the case and you find an arbitrary predicate that seems to convey 
the meaning you're looking for, then I don't think there's much point in 
reusing vocabulary. I'd rather save the time searching, mint my own 
property, and get on with whatever I'm working on.

Down the road if I see (or am told of) an application consuming similar 
SW data using a different predicate, I can always update my data then 
and still reap the benefits of reuse. Updating my data could be as 
simple as adding rdfs:subPropertyOf or owl:equivalentProperty relations, 
or--if in a reasonerless world--using a straightforward SPARQL Update 
statement to augment your data.

Reuse is great but, like code optimizations, it's often not necessary 
upfront. It can be added later on once the real value of the reuse is 
understood. And if you never see the value of reuse, then your data 
and/or applications can flourish with the predicate that you minted for 
yourself, and you saved yourself the time otherwise spent searching in 
the first place.

Lee

>
> 2. Suppose I face the dataset I never use before. What do you usually do
> first to get a first impression about the dataset? At the moment I first
> make some SPARQL queries to this dataset, such as:
> select COUNT(?x) WHERE
> {
> ?x a ?z .
> }
>
> than I use Marbles or Sig.ma to surf randomly over this data and finally
> I come up with a opinion where I need data from the dataset or not.
> Again, what do you usually do? Is there a tools or useful queries that
> can help Semantic Web user in browsing data and getting useful info
> about datasets?
>
> Thank you in advance!
>
> Yury Katkov

Received on Sunday, 31 October 2010 03:23:39 UTC