Re: [protege-user] Ontology Names

Igor Toujilov via protege-user <[email protected]> Thu, 1 Jan 2026 19:56:16 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.misc.ontology.protege.owl
Message-ID <trinity-8da6c767-e192-4ac3-86f3-fc443d64bfa9-1767293776057@3c-app-mailcom-lxa09>
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<html><head></head><body><div style="font-family: Verdana;font-size: 12.0px;"><div>What about using # instead of /? Look at [1]. I recommend # if you committed to high level (OWL) ontology development rather than low level (RDF) ontology development. The hash (#) separator provides additional information: it tells the user that the name refers to a standard (OWL) entity which will never be expanded/split to multiple entities. This provides a strong interoperability assurance.</div>

<div>
<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>[1]&nbsp;Best Practices for Implementing FAIR&nbsp;Vocabularies and Ontologies on the Web,&nbsp;https://dgarijo.com/papers/best_practices2020.pdf</div>

<div>&nbsp;
<div name="quote" style="margin:10px 5px 5px 10px; padding: 10px 0 10px 10px; border-left:2px solid #C3D9E5; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">
<div style="margin:0 0 10px 0;"><b>Sent:</b>&nbsp;Saturday, December 27, 2025 at 9:55 PM<br/>
<b>From:</b>&nbsp;&quot;Michael DeBellis&quot; &lt;[email protected]&gt;<br/>
<b>To:</b>&nbsp;&quot;User support for WebProtege and Protege Desktop&quot; &lt;[email protected]&gt;<br/>
<b>Subject:</b>&nbsp;[protege-user] Ontology Names</div>

<div name="quoted-content">
<div>I recently came across an example where a client was using IRIs like: <a href="https://example_domain/example_ontology/" target="_blank">https://example_domain/example_ontology/</a>

<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>I.e., they were concatenating the separator character&nbsp;(the &quot;/&quot;) with the IRI name. The way I&#39;ve always done it is the IRI for the ontology would be:&nbsp;&nbsp;</div>

<div><a href="https://example_domain/example_ontology" target="_blank">https://example_domain/example_ontology</a>&nbsp;</div>

<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>and the prefix for entities in the ontology would be: <a href="https://example_domain/example_ontology/" target="_blank">https://example_domain/example_ontology/</a>&nbsp;</div>

<div>(I always use the slash delimiter, I think it is a bit more efficient for large graphs).&nbsp;</div>

<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>To my surprise everything seems to be working in their graph but I don&#39;t recall ever seeing those kinds of IRIs. Maybe I just never noticed before. Two questions:</div>

<div>1) Is that consistent with the OWL guidelines for naming ontologies?</div>

<div>2) Assuming the answer is yes to 1, do people think that is a good idea or are there potential problems that could result?</div>

<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>Happy Holidays,</div>

<div>Michael</div>

<div><a href="https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog" target="_blank">https://www.michaeldebellis.com/blog</a></div>
</div>
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