Re: Minutes HCLS TC 3-22-07

On Mar 22, 2007, at 12:15 PM, Eric Neumann wrote:
>    EN - Thinks continuing to enhance OWL is a good thing. Is unsure  
> as to
>    how the proposed enhancements help the life sciences. Puning  
> seems to be
>    one of the big things.

Qualified cardinality restrictions (QCRs) are useful all over the  
place. They allow one to classify based on there being a certain  
number of instances of a specific class as a property. The classic  
example is  that you can now say that a hand has_part 5 digits,  
has_part 4 fingers, has_part 1 thumb. Before QCRs you could only say  
hand has_part 5 things. Can be used to implement the ACPP counted  
inclusion and exclusion criteria rules.

Datatypes allow the specification of classes that restrict, e.g. a  
number to a certain range. So you can define "Adult" as someone whos  
age is greater  than 18 years. Useful in the clinical context, e.g.,   
for classification based on diagnostic results.

Role inclusions allow for propagation of values across more than one  
property.  A useful example would be when using reified properties.  
This is useful in, e.g. Biopax,  where it will allow you to much more  
cleanly connect pathways to participants in the pathways. That's  
because you can express the fact that if a complex is a participant,  
and the complex has components,  then the components are also  
participants.

component o participant < participant.

>    VK - Hasn't seen a use case for puning.  Data type reasoning
>    enhancements sound valuable. Rule chain inclusions would be very
>    valuable. Qualified cardinality constraints is another  
> enhancement, but
>    can be done with OWL as is. Transition shouldn't be too painful as
>    enterprises haven't adopted OWL yet, and open source software  
> already
>    supports OWL 1.1.
Punning gets rid of a big reason for using annotation properties,  
when you otherwise would
want to use a datatype or object property with a class or property as  
subject. Punning lets you do
that, with the caveat that, e.g, properties of classes don't have any  
effects on their instances.
It implements this by allowing a given URI to be a name for an  
instance, a class, and a property
all at the same time and using the usage context to decide which of  
the three is meant.

It happens all the same that you want to, say, restrict some property  
(say curator) to one of several values.
Since curator makes sense for both classes and instances, previously  
you couldn't say this because
being a property of a class meant the property had to be an  
annotation, and therefore have no axioms.
Now it no longer does.

>    EN - Is there anything that should be done regarding an IG  
> writing a
>    letter of support for a WG.
>
>    ACTION: VK and AR to write a letter of support for OWL 1.1.
Cool. Hope the above helps give a clearer sense of why OWL 1.1 will  
be a good thing.

-Alan

Received on Thursday, 22 March 2007 20:54:23 UTC