Terminology - Ontology and Language

Question

I wanted to know your opinion on the terminology while writing an academic paper.

Consider a scenario: Company ABC use OWL/RDF to describe certain sets of ontologies. Can they name an ontology for a specific aspect (eg. products) as language (e.g Products Description Language)? How are they different from domain-level ontologies (e.g. In Retail/Manufacturing, etc.)

I am trying to draw the same analagy as WSDL/HTML/XHTML, being created using XML/SGML. (both are termed as languages, they have their descriptions along with the corresponding schema)

Often, we see "An Ontology-based approach to describing Products." Is that the only approach possible?

One of my colleagues insists that semantic web service frameworks like OWL-S cannot be called language, they rather an extension to OWL and simply ontologies. However, several areas in W3C submission document, they are referred to as OWL.

Could someone please clear this terminology mess-up?

Answer 1

Do you mean that you'd like to make an ontology and say that the ontology is defining a language of its own? Like, I use XML Schema to define XHTML documents, and I call this the XHTML language? Well, this would be a simplistic view of what's a language. A language requires a semantics, otherwise, it's just a grammar.

I could redefine the XML Schema for XHTML, put it in a file, and reference it from XML documents, but it would not make these documents XHTML. Try:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<html xmlns="xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.example.com/xhtml.xsd">
    <head>
        <title>Example</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Title</h1>
        <p>Yadi yada.</p>
    </body>
</html>

The schema is the same, the document is valid, but a browser cannot do anything with this, because the markup has no meaning here.

It's the same for ontologies. If you don't specify a certain meaning that implementations have to take in consideration, it's not a language. Now, there is always an intended meaning behind ontology terms but as long as you do not require it formally, it's just an indication that people or software may not take in consideration.

Terminology - Ontology and Language

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