Defining subsets of existing OWL / RDF-S vocabularies in another vocabulary?

Dear all:

Is it valid to locally define a subset of an existing OWL / RDF-S 
vocabulary in your own vocabulary in order to
a) avoid ontology imports or
b) make it simple for annotation tools to display only a relevant subset 
of that external vocabulary?

In other words, can I declare some FOAF or Dublin Core vocabulary 
elements, which are relevant for my annotation task, locally in my new 
___domain vocabulary, instead of adding an import statement for the whole 
vocabulary in the ontology header?

If that was okay, it would make it easier to prepare pre-composed blends 
of relevant ontologies that can be directly used for form-based instance 
data creation.

However, I fear that defining an element that is residing in someone 
else's URI space is not okay, since I (e.g. http://www.heppnetz.de) have 
no authority of defining the semantics of an element that is within
|http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/, even if I what I am saying is consistent 
with the authoritative definition of the given vocabulary element. |
||
||I am assuming that I duplicate the very same specification of the 
element, i.e., I would assure that my definition just replicates a 
subset of the official vocabulary. I also abstract from semantic 
dependencies, i.e., whether it is possible to specify a consistent 
subset of a given vocabulary (this may not be trivial for an expressive 
DL ontology, but should be feasible for lightweight RDF-S or OWL 
vocabularies). Also, the legal point of view (whether I am allowed to 
replicate an existing specification) is less relevant for me at the 
moment. I just want to know whether this is an acceptable practice from 
a Web Architecture perspective.

Any feedback would be very much appreciated!

Best

Martin
-----------------------------------------------------

martin hepp
e-mail: martin.hepp@deri.at
web:    http://www.heppnetz.de
skype:  mfhepp
office: +43 512 507 6465

Check eClassOWL, the first real-world e-business ontology
for products and services in OWL at
http://www.heppnetz.de/eclassOWL

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2007 18:21:33 UTC