Some thoughts on SW Best Practices

Guus Schreiber, Web Ontology WG co-chair
SW Architecture meeting, Tech Plenary, 6-7 March 2003

General objective

Helping users to set up their (first) semantic-web application. Note: objective over lap with SWAD Europe/MIT activities.

Themes:

1. Supporting initiatives for publishing vocabularies

Goal: Supporting/initiating efforts for making existing/upcoming vocabularies/thesauri/ontologies publicly available in RDFS/OWL format for SW applications.

Examples:

• Lexical corpora, e.g., WordNet,
• Dublin Core and its specializations (e.g. VRA Core Categories)
• Cultural-heritage standards/thesauri, e.g. Getty thesauri (Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, Thesaurus of Geographic Names), ICONCLASS
• Medical vocabularies (many)
• Scientific disciplines. e.g molecular biology
• Top-level categories, e.g. OpenCyc).

Note: public domains such as medicine, science, cultural heritage and public libraries are likely to be prime focus points.

2. FAQs and how-to-do-it guidelines

Setting up an archive of guidelines and examples for:

• transforming existing representations into RDFS/OWL
• constructing ontologies, covering typical modelling problems such as defaults, part-of, ....
• ontology mapping: how to use multiple heterogeneous ontologies in an interoperable way.
• guidelines on ontology integration/unifications vs. mapping (the latter is usually preferred)
• how to combine RDF/OWL with XML/XHTML

3. Tool and demo applications

Tool/application archive:

• RDF/RDFS/OWL parsers
• reasoners
• query languages
• demo applications, including reflective ones such as:
  • the archive itself?!
  • W3C glossary?!

Facilities for opens-source development

4. Links to related techniques

Publishing technical notes on issues such as:

• the relationship between semantic web and topic maps
• using UML for ontology development/visualization
• semantic grid initiatives

This should typically be done in cooperation with the other organizations involved (OASIS, OMG)

Organization