Screwdrivers & Properties

Screwdrivers generally have only a small set of head configurations (flat, Phillips, hex) because the intention is to make accessing contents or securing parts easy (or at least uniform).Properties & Proliferations

Now imagine how frustrating it would be if every screw and bolt in your house or car required a unique screwdriver head.  They might be grouped together (for example, a bunch of different sized hex heads), but each one was slightly different.  Any maintenance task would take much longer and the amount of time spent just organizing the screwdrivers would be inordinate.

Yet that is precisely the approach that most OWL modelers take when they over-specify their ontology’s properties.

“Avoiding Property Proliferations – Part 1” discusses the pitfalls of habitually applying domains and ranges to properties.

Click here to download the whitepaper.

Dan Carey

View posts by Dan Carey
Dan Carey is an ontologist and data architect with over 30 years of consulting experience, most of it designing ontologies, data architectures, data strategies, and application databases with major IT service and consulting firms. With Semantic Arts, he develops and implements modular ontologies for large firms, primarily in the financial industry.
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