Re: how many models of your ontology?

Jim --

You wrote:  >From a practical point of view, does the number of models ever 
enter into
consideration?

You may be interested in a formal approach that yields exactly one model [1].

There's a practical system based on this, live, online with a number of 
examples, at www.reengineeringllc.com .  The author- and user-interface is 
simply a browser, and experimental use is free.

HTH,  -- Adrian

[1] Backchain Iteration: Towards a Practical Inference Method that is 
Simple Enough to be Proved Terminating, Sound and Complete. Journal of 
Automated Reasoning, 11:1-22.

At 10:16 AM 11/11/2004 -0500, you wrote:


>Suppose you have ontology, consisting of axioms and instance data, that:
>
>* deals with a small finite domain;
>
>* has constants for each element in the domain;
>
>* has just 1 (binary) relation symbol;
>
>* has no function symbols;
>
>* uses a decidable fragment of FOL.
>
>
>Do you care if the ontology has, literally, millions or billions of models?
>
>I ask this in both an aethetic and a practical sense.
>
>For instance, from an aesthetic point of view, I could see an argument
>that says, "If you have millions or billions of models, then you didn't do a
>very good job of writing axioms or populating the ontology with data tuples."
>If this argument is pursued, where's the cutoff? A million? A billion?
>
> >From a practical point of view, does the number of models ever enter into
>consideration?
>
>Jim

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2004 16:00:55 UTC