Igor, Mike, Bill, List, As Yogi Berrra said, these discussions are "Deja vu all over again." Re "No SQL": The person who coined that term, rewrote it as Not Only SQL The original SQL was designed for data that is best organized in a table. The fact that other data might be better represented in other formats does not invalidate the use of tables for data that is naturally tabular. Re tree structure in ontologies: A tree structure for the NAMES of an ontology does NOT imply that the named data happens to be a tree. Some of the data might be organized in a tree, but other data might be better organized in a table, list, vector, matrix, tensor, graph, multidimensional shapes, or combinations of all of them. The following survey article was written about 40 years of developments from 1970 to 2010. Some new methods have been invented since then, but 90% of the discussions are about new names for old ideas re-invented by people who didn't know the history. I wrote the survey, but 95% of the links are to writings by other people; https://jfsowa.com/ikl . And by the way, I agree with Bill Burkett (on the list down below). He is one of the people I collaborated with on various committees in the past many years. We viewed the Deja Vu over and over and over. That's one reason why I don't get excited by new names. John ---------------------------------------- From: "Igor Toujilov' via ontolog-forum" <ontolog-forum(a)googlegroups.com Mike, I would not say "Ontologies are represented in graph structures" only. Ontologies can be represented in a wide range of formalisms, including graphs, which are just one possible representation. For example, there are tools to store the same ontology in different representation formats: RDF/XML, Turtle, OWL Functional Syntax, Manchester OWL Syntax, etc. Yes, RDF and Turtle are graph representations. But OWL Functional and Manchester syntaxes have nothing to do with graphs. And yet they represent the same ontology. I also disagree that "the workforce needs conventional everyday interfaces driven by relational databases". It depends on your system architecture. Today many systems use No-SQL or graph databases successfully without any need for relational databases. In real systems, the difference between data models and ontologies can be sharp or subtle. Some systems continue using relational databases while performing some tasks on ontologies. Other systems have ontologies that are tightly integrated in the production process, so sometimes it is hard to separate the ontologies from data. And of course, there is a wide range of systems in between of those extreme cases. Igor On Mon, 30 Dec 2024 at 19:14, Mike Peters <mike(a)redworks.co.nz> wrote: > > >> >> > > > > >> > From: Mike Peters <mi...(a)redworks.co.nz >> > To: ontolo...(a)googlegroups.com <ontolo...(a)googlegroups.com >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> > >> > >> > >> > >> >