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

Revision as of 03:47, 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 with one or more solutions implemented and explained. Include figures to illustrate the issues.