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conveyed in a message” (2004), modelled in IRW as
InformationResource
.
This definition has widely been thought of as unclear, and defining what set of
individuals belong in this class and what do not has been a source of perpetual debate
on various list-servs. In order to clarify this notion we decided to reuse a known
ontology pattern i.e. the
Information Realization
content ontology pattern, referred
to with prefix
ir:
. Remarkably, this content ontology pattern is extracted from the
DOLCE Ultra Light ontology
8
and is implemented also in the Core Ontology for
Multimedia (COMM)
9
for addressing a similar modeling issue. The reuse of such
a content pattern also supports interoperability with other ontologies that reuse it.
This pattern-based approach to ontology design is a strength of IRW.
Notice that the
ir:
is very small, two classes and two object properties, hence it
is convenient to simply directly import all of the
Information Realization
pattern. An
InformationResource
is viewed to be equivalent to the notion of
information
object
from
ir:
, such as a musical composition, a text, a word, or a picture. An
information object is an object defined at a level of abstraction, independently
from how it is concretely realized. This means an information resource has, via
the
ir:realizes
property (with inverse
ir:isRealizedBy
), at least one
ir:InformationRealization
, a concrete
realization
. The fact that any in-
formation resource's “essential characteristics can be conveyed in a single message”
implies that everything from a bound topic to the electric voltages that encode an
HTTP message can be a realization of an information resource (Jacobs and Walsh
2004). Furthermore, the property
about
(and inverse property,
isTopicOf
)
expresses the relationship between an information resource and other resource (or
resources) that an information resource is 'about.'
Examples of realizations are descriptions of a resource using natural language
or depictions of a resource using images. Information resources can be, but not
necessarily, identified (accessed or referred to) by a URI. In this manner, the text of
Moby Dick can be an information resource since it could be conveyed as a single
message in English, and can be realized by both a particular topic or a web-page
containing that text. Thus, the definition of information object and information
realization can be thought of as similar to the classic 'type-token' division in
philosophy of mind between an object given on a level of abstraction and some
concrete thing which realizes that abstraction, where that single abstraction may
have multiple realizations. This is similar, but broader than the class-individual
distinction as one may want to model the 'token' or 'realization' itself as a class. As
such, it's also broader than the
TBox
and
ABox
distinction from description logic.
InformationResource
: An OWL Class. “A resource which has the prop-
erty that all of its essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message” (Jacobs
and Walsh 2004).
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