Classes Vs Individuals

OK, first stumbling block when trying to create an ontology. When should I model something as a Class and when should I model it as an Individual??

In general Classes describe a concept and an Individual fulfills that description. In other words the individual or instance is the realization of the concept described by the class.

Now, maybe it's just cause I am used to it, but in programming this is easy to comprehend as there is a very clear distinction between a Class and an instance of that class (or object). However I must say this distinction is not as obvious in OWL.

For the moment I am going with this general rule of thumb. If the "thing" is going to be either the subject or object in a triple than it will be an Individual. What that "thing" is, well that will have to be the Class.

Creating a Blogging Ontology - Part 1

Ok, well long time without a post but hopefully this is the start of something now. The goal at the moment is to create an ontology specifically for blogging. It is going to mostly consist of terms defined by SIOC, FOAF and Dublin Core. In fact at this moment I'm not even sure if I will need additional terms or if there will be enough in those three.

Once that's done the next step is to codify it up, I'm using JENA which already has DC and FOAF support so just have to add a few things myself there. After that I'll post again to see how things are.