OWL – assumptions and a quick win
This is a bit of a note to self, but also may provide insight into some of the challenges that I see when I’m trying to work with semantic web technologies.
In a closed world database, I could just assume that I could create a bunch of tables with column names that mean stuff to me, and start capturing the data that I want. That data would be stuff I knew about, and who cares about the rest. I have got my data haven’t I?
But what I am trying to do is describe things that other people don’t seem to have described before. Or at least, not in the context that I am describing them. I want to describe them in such a way that open world assumptions (if there are such a thing) can be made.
OWL, therefore strikes me as being a great way to describe a thing, and the relationships between things or parts of things. But – and this is where I get to the nub of the problem – All the examples of OWL and of writing OWL seem to have made assumptions somewhere. Those assumptions not being immediately obvious.
So. I am getting confused. All I want are some simple rules that I can follow. Maybe part of the problem is that I don’t get a whole lot of time to devote to thins issue. Perhaps I am wanting a quick way to get to a workable conclusion.
Right, lets do some more reading…