[rdfweb-dev] Re: licence for Ontologies

[Ron Alford]

Danny Ayers wrote:
> Regarding Ron's points about alternate view of terms - well yes,
> someone could mirror say the FOAF spec with additions and
> modifications and that could be valid according to the RDF model.

I'm not sure what the big deal is about alternate versions of Ontologies.
If you take the straight foaf ontology and apply it to Live Journal's
data, you will get tons of false inferences (in the real life sense,
anyways). They are, by default, using an unpublished and distinct
version of Foaf.


In my own copy of Foaf, I've been tempted to model Organizations as a
subclass of Group.  This would allow me to do membership and other
things that are beneficial to what I'm trying to express.

Taken together, the axioms in the ontology form rules for expressing the
implicit.  My use of foaf:Organization is one way of several to express
that I'm talking about the same thing, but disagreeing on the
definition.  See wikipedia for some examples of disagreement on
definitions.  Do we expect the semantic web to be any different?

My instance data specifically imports this copy of foaf, so that
reasoners know exactly what rules I'm following, and can classify
accordingly.


> Things could get complicated if they introduced assertions that led to
>  inconsistencies with the 'official' schema (in human or logical
> terms). Say someone wants to say "John knows Rioja", and add the
> statement:
> =

> foaf:knows rdfs:range vin:Wine

Does this somehow corrupt the original foaf?  No, because the original
ontology at it's published and findable location is still intact.  It
boils down to a problem of contexts, and if you don't keep context in
mind when working on the web, you're sunk before you even begin.


> =

> Whether anything in human law, copyright or whatever, may be useful in
> encouraging consistency, I don't know.
> =


Consistency is already heavily tilted towards the owner of the URI.
However, trying to mandate definitions in RDF seems futile and
aggravating. to me.  Does foaf need specific permission in order to
subclass foaf:Person?
What if want to express the ontology in RuleML, DAML, First order logic,
OWL with E-connections, etc?

-Ron

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