Re: Detection, where? How? (was Re: Allowed types of punning (ISSUE-114))

I think Bijan substantially over-characterizes the extent to which  
lint-like tools solve problems. Among other things, lint-like tools  
only really work when, for each "suspicious" construct flagged, there  
is an "unsuspicious" construct with the exact same meaning. In other  
words, users need to be able to avoid lint warnings if they really  
know what they're doing and they're clear in their intent. You  
shouldn't just cordon off whole features and say "if you use any of  
this stuff, which we considered useful enough to require implementors  
to support, then you're making a mistake".

But really this just strikes me as a silly road to go down. We could  
allow just about any syntax and say that most of it produces  
unsatisfiable expressions or inconsistent ontologies. Such an approach  
would be nothing but punting on the spec: the working group will have  
failed to decide what a reasonable OWL fragment is, so OWL will be de  
facto defined by lint-like tools. This would have some appeal to the  
largest tool vendors, but I feel quite strongly that it is not an  
approach the working group should endorse.

(I also think it would be a huge waste of time for the working group  
to define *two* OWL-DL standards: one of syntactically valid  
ontologies and one of semantically sensible ontologies. The OWL-Full/ 
OWL-DL split is already headache enough.)


On 10 Jul 2008, at 13:16, Bijan Parsia wrote:

> Forbidding object/data, class/type punning seems reasonable to me

Then, as far as I can tell, Alan is the only one who finds it  
unreasonable.

-rob