BestPracticesChris

Best Practice Goals

by ChrisWelty for [1]

  Don't ask an aeronautical engineer to fly a plane.

Three points:

• Best Practices (not just practices): An important, and I believe implicit in the name Best Practices, element of our mission is some notion of correctness or general acceptance of an approach or technique. I strongly believe this group should not simply build a catalog of all the OWL/RDF applications, but distill from them the best solutions and approaches. It will be hard, of course, to define what "correct" means, but probably less hard to define what "acceptance" means.
  • We're not cheerleaders: Success stories are not necessarily best practices
  • Tests (as in OWL tests http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-test-20040210/) are usually not best practises
  • Not a trashbin (need a process for accepting/rejecting work?)
• Ontology Patterns: Akin to design patterns. I started something along these lines, see PartWhole.
• Worst Practices: Almost as important as pointing out correct/accepted approaches is documenting modeling pitfalls and common mistakes that people make . There are several of these in the OWL Guide and the Wine Ontology, which is unfortunate, but none of us had the time or resources to fix it at the time.