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Is it good/tolerable practice to use elements from W3C standards in a (wannabe five-star) Linked Open Data Ontology?

For example, there is fo:region-body, which is an element of the XSL-FO standard (the prefix fo pointing to namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format). Imagine I want to use it in an RDF triple in a Linked Open Data Ontology.

It is not a “class” (in the RDF/RDFS/OWL jargon) from some other ontology. But it does belong to a (very official, W3C-defined) namespace.

So my question is: can I use it in my LOD ontology triples?

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While it is in many ways desirable to re-use existing vocabularies when there is chance (since it gives people opportunity to discover useful ontologies or understand your data using existing technologies), you should be cautious about several things:

  • Is it a namespace that is actually usable in RDF? While XML namespaces are in theory identifiable through their URI in RDF, their contents generally are not. A qualified name in XML does not map to a URI on its own, so you would have to pick one, probably either http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format#region-body or http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format/region-body. Sometimes the authors do indicate a mapping, but if not, you'd run into the risk of being incompatible with others.

    XML namespaces are generally not a good target for usage in RDF, due to these incompatibilities. On the other hand, W3C standards that are actually RDF-based are great!

  • Does the term actually express the meaning you expect from it, within reasonable precision? Not just by name, but by definition, connotation, etc. For example, a table may be a piece of furniture or a document element, so first be sure it really is the one you expect. You should avoid "novel approach" of using a term.

  • Are there any RDF definitions of the term that might run into conflict with your usage? Be especially watchful of rdfs:range/rdfs:domain, since those will apply to your resources too if you link them using such properties.

  • Would your usage of the term risk "polluting" the global space with facts that might cause issues for others? This includes even inferred facts, like inferring a rdf:Property from usage, or the consequences of using OWL.

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