Difference between revisions of "'Ontology Design Patterns':WhatIsAModelingIssue"

Latest revision as of 03:52, 3 March 2010

Modeling Issue: A modeling issue is a question or problem that arises during the ontology engineering process. There are many kinds of issues and many ways to solve them. A modeling issue typically involves:

• not knowing how to proceed during an ontology engineering exercise
• identifying the specific representation requirements
• identifying what combinations of language constructs can meet the representation requirements
• evaluating the tradeoffs of different possible solutions.

A superb example of this is found in the document: Representing Classes As Property Values on the Semantic Web.

Two key ways that modeling issues vary are:

• Domain Specificity: Modeling issues may be
  • highly specific to narrow domains (e.g. protein folding in molecular biology)
  • domain independent (e.g. Should instances of classes be modeled as SKOS:Concept).
  • somewhere in between, i.e. broadly applicable in one or more fairly general domains.

• How well defined: Modeling issues may be
  • very clearly defined, with competency questions and proposed solution options with tradeoffs already analyzed
  • very rough early thoughts from the person submitting.
  • somewhere in between.

Actions:

• View or Contribute to modeling issues already posted
• How do I Post or Contribute to a modeling issue?
• Post a modeling issue now.

	The goal is for all modeling issues to: reach a stage of being very clearly defined have one or more implemented solutions linked to design patterns be clearly explained so others can benefit from your efforts be illustrated by at least one figure.