Jeni's Musings

“it seemed that the Semantic Web depended on people doing things in one way: using big standard ontologies with RDF/XML representations.”

This is a classic claim by people who argue against RDF and OWL, but there’s really nothing to back it up. Sure, there are projects like CYC that claim to be the one big ontology that people will need, and they often have an RDF interface, but general semantic web advocacy spends far more energy arguing against this claim than providing anything to support it. (Try a Google search on “one big ontology”.)

“Also encouraging is that OWL specifically supports linking between ontologies, allowing you to indicate that classes, properties and individuals from different ontologies are equivalent. This means you are free to create your own local ontology, as am I, and either of us (or a third party) can later link the two ontologies together, along with any related triples.”

Now you’ve got it!