Re: Survey on titles for OWL2 Semantics documents

On 22 Sep 2008, at 12:58, Sandro Hawke wrote:

>
>> On 19 Sep 2008, at 16:29, Ivan Herman wrote:
>>
>>> Ah! So the remark could be translated as 'there is nothing DL  
>>> specific
>>> in it'. Right? This makes sense...
>>>
>>
>> indeed, this is what I tried to say, cheers, Uli
>
> I'm baffled by this.
>
> I'm pretty sure they are not the semantics of full first-order logic.
>

no, but the basic idea and structure is the same.

> And they are the semantics of OWL DL, which I understand is a
> description logic (DL) language.  (As the W3C Recommendation on the
> subject says, "OWL DL is so named due to its correspondence with
> description logics".)
>
> So that makes them very DL specific.
>
> What have I got wrong about this?
>

DLs are (well-behaved) fragments of first order predicate logic, and  
they have "the same" semantics. So, if I knew something about FOL,  
then i should be able to understand the semantics -- even if i had  
never heard about DLs since there is nothing "DL specific" in them.

> Maybe you're parsing the phrase "DL Semantics" in parallel to like
> "Model-Theoretic Semantics", as if the term "DL" is indicating how the
> semantics are specified?

yes - and it might sound like 'exotic semantics' to some where, in  
fact, it's straightforward first order semantics.

> That would explain your comments, I suppose.
> Or you think other people will parse it that way?  To mean "DL
> Semantics" is just a less clumsy way of saying "Semantics of the OWL  
> DL
> family of languages", and as such it seems like the perfect name.
>

indeed, I would be afraid that people would *not* read it like this  
but as in "semantics for which you need to know DLs and which doesn't  
fit into anything but DLs", which I wouldn't like.

Cheers, Uli

> I note that the phrase "DL Semantics" is often used in our meetings
> (Google doesn't index our minutes very well, but it finds occurances  
> in
> 63 documents) and I don't think I've heard anyone complain about this
> usage.  Maybe soemthing in the intonation of "DL" makes it more clear.
>
> (Meanwhile, we have a real problem here.  We have at least two No  
> votes
> to every title.  If we mean "No" like "formal objection" (which is  
> how I
> meant it - but the survey isn't clear about this), then we're not  
> going
> to be able to publish until we make some serious headway on this.)
>
> (Re: comments about "Yes, and prefer not" -- that's a way of saying  
> you
> don't like this option, but you don't actually believe it would do
> serious harm to OWL to go with it -- ie, you're not going to formally
> object.)
>
>    -- Sandro

Received on Monday, 22 September 2008 13:10:35 UTC