I’ve had problems getting OWL’s import mechanism to work before, and once I got a simple demo of it to work I wanted to make it available. owl:imports is great because it helps make your ontologies more modular, even letting you separate your ontology from the data it describes, sort of like—dare I say it—a schema.

While reading the W3C Recommendation OWL Use Cases and Requirements, I was surprised at how many nice, succinct explanations of basic OWL and ontology-related concepts it had, so I thought I’d reproduce some highlights here. For example, take its definition of an ontology:

I stopped reading BoingBoing some time ago, but my co-worker Eliot Kimber just pointed me to a BoingBoing item that makes fun of obsessive ontological design. It’s not every day that you see a Protégé screenshot or references to monotonicity constraints in a BoingBoing humor piece. Ironically, the idea of classifying cute cats could get my younger daughter interested in using Protégé, but she’d probably be better off with SWOOP.

After I wrote recently about tweaking a Movable Type template so that RDFa metadata would be automatically generated with the individual archive versions of each weblog posting, Ben Adida suggested that it would be better if I had added the markup inline with the weblog entry instead of grouping it into a single block in the web page’s head element.

Did you know that the default template for the Movable Type weblog publishing software adds metadata in commented-out RDF/XML to permalink pages? (By “permalink pages,” I mean the pages that store permanent versions of each weblog entry, as opposed to the versions on the main index page, which are only there for a few weeks.) For example, this weblog is one I picked at random after doing a Google search for “Movable Type”; doing a View Source on it will show the…

Lee Feigenbaum’s recent posting Using RDF on the Web: A Survey is worth reading for anyone considering any kind of RDF development work, web-based or otherwise. At first, I thought that he was limiting himself by requiring that applications and tools be capable of both reading and writing RDF data, but after reading his list, I’m glad he did. I also found the wide choice of JSON-related systems to be interesting—they could lead the way to something that definitively answers the…

I love this recent quote from Jim Hendler: