[TagCommons-WG] mechanisms for sharing tag data

[Marja Koivunen]

I vote for keepings things simple for users. That's why we have tags 
anyway. At least that's why I created tags in Annotea. And that's 
probably why so many people in our field did not understand it at first. 
But we are doing tools for users who are not so exact, who are not in 
our field, and who do not necessarily know what ontology means and even 
if they do they need to learn it.

Annotea has a basic schema already. Why cannot we use that? It can be 
easily extended when needed. And what best , other available metadata 
can be combined with that.

Marja

Nitin Borwankar wrote:
> Richard Newman wrote:
>
>   
>> On  1 Mar 2007, at 5:31 PM, Nitin Borwankar wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I am wary of acccepting a single database 
>>>       
>> Nitin,
>>   I think you're misunderstanding the word 'ontology' in this  
>> context. An ontology describes the conceptual model of a domain, a  
>> model that an interface programmatically encodes. The idea of an  
>> interface that doesn't commit to a single ontological model is  
>> nonsensical.
>>
>>   Of course, the choice of URIs in a particular RDF encoding of such  
>> an ontology is a different matter, but the ontology itself  
>> necessitates quite a firm contractual commitment from a participant.  
>> For example, that a tagging event is some kind of relation between a  
>> tagging party, a tagged resource, and a tag is a core part of such an  
>> ontology.
>>
>>     
> OK, agreed that my previous statement does misunderstand what is meant 
> by 'ontology'.
>
> To clarify, I assume  that we all have a common subset of things, types 
> and relationships in our tagging models,  and that each of our models 
> diverges from this common subset in our specific domains.  Implicit in 
> my statements is the assumption that we express these relationships in 
> common English language first in our glossary.
> This is the intersection model if we can arrive at it.
>
> Call that an informal core ontology if you want.  The initial interfaces 
> would represents operations on the ontology expressed in the glossary.
> At this level I don't understand the added value of using the word 
> ontology rather than using language used in creating a data model.
> Formally I understand that even at this stage we must call it an ontology.
>
> My understanding (or misunderstanding) of the use of ontology beyond 
> ordinary data modeling is that in specific application domains,
> more domain-specific  relationships are added to the core relationships 
> and relationships more complex and expressive than has-one, has-many are 
> constructed to properly
> cover the domain. If we want to call the initial common data model an 
> ontology that's fine - but I was using the word where I see 'ontology' 
> adding more than just the
> has-one, has-many relationships of simple data models.  Flickr's 
> ontology would add things, types and relationships  unique to photos but 
> not useful in discussion of bookmarks.   If this understanding of 
> ontology is wrong  then  I need to 'go look  it up'.
>
> So to restate - we should arrive at a simple core ontology that we can 
> express in a) english in the form of a glossary and b) a data model. ( 
> ER diagram, RDF ...)
> These are required for interoperability between public web applications 
> currently practising tagging in specific application domains.
> The intent is that the core will be useful to all or most of the 
> existing apps.
>
> Then we add interfaces that allow common CRUD operations on this data model.
> I keep reverting to describing it as a data model because the way I was 
> looking at the core - it would contain relationships expressed as 
> has-one and has-many only.
>
> Sorry for abusing and loosely using the term ontology,  I get pretty 
> upset when people misuse formal terms in my domain as well.
>
> Nitin.
>
>   
>> I think that the difference in our viewpoints comes from a difference  
>> in our definitions of "ontology".
>>
>>     
> Yes, and I hope there's less of a difference now.
>
>