Re: Choice construct questions

It's a leftover, and it should also be removed (in fact, was removed 
late last night :-).

Cheers,
David

Daniel Elenius wrote:
> What about the "chosen" property. Should it remain, or is it also a 
> leftover from previous versions?
> 
> Evren Sirin wrote:
> 
>>
>> Daniel,
>> The comments in Process.owl are left from older versions of OWL-S and 
>> in the most recent technical overview document Choice is simply 
>> defined as:
>>
>>> Choice is a control construct whose key property is chooseFrom, whose 
>>> value is a list of processes the execution of one of which 
>>> constitutes execution of the Choice.
>>>
>>> [[ This wording is a significant scale-down from the original idea, 
>>> which involved being able to choose an arbitrary number of the 
>>> processes specified as chooseFrom, and then impose further 
>>> constraints on the set chosen. We have decided to simplify because 
>>> the machinery used to implement the original idea was not thought 
>>> through carefully, and because there doesn't seem to be much demand 
>>> for the complicated version. ]]
>>>
>>
>> Obviously, we need to revise the comments in Process.owl to be 
>> compatible with this simplified definition. Actually, one thing we 
>> might consider to simplify the definition even more is simply use 
>> process:components instead of process:chooseFrom to specify the bag of 
>> processes. That would make the definition more compatible with the 
>> rest of control constructs, e.g. Sequence, Any-Order, Split all use 
>> process:components property.
>>
>> Evren
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Daniel Elenius wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I'm slightly confused regarding the Choice construct, especially the 
>>> comments about it in Process.owl, and the
>>> "chosen" property (definitions from Process.owl below).
>>>
>>> First of all, the rdf:comment. It mentions a "choose property", which 
>>> "takes a choice bag and returns a chosen
>>> bag". This does not make sense. There is nothing called "choose" in 
>>> OWL-S, and properties don't have parameters
>>> and return values.
>>>
>>> Second, the "chosen" property. I assume that this is supposed to 
>>> point to what the service consumer actually chooses
>>> to execute. But why do we need such a property? Its value will depend 
>>> on actual execution, so the process chosen
>>> by the user should be kept track of by the OWL-S execution engine, 
>>> not the service instance. Unless it needs to
>>> be referenced somewhere else in the service...
>>>
>>> ...which may be the case given the comments after the definition of 
>>> the Choice class. It mentions being able to
>>> express "choose n from m" etc using cardinality restrictions, and 
>>> being able to describe how to execute the chosen
>>> construct(s). A possible interpretation is: If we have e.g. a 
>>> Sequence, where the first element is a Choice, and the
>>> second is an Any-Order, the Any-Order can use the value of the 
>>> "chosen" property as the value of its "components"
>>> property. This would mean: First choose a number of the control 
>>> constructs in the "chooseFrom" bag of the Choice, and
>>> then execute the chosen constructs in Any-Order.
>>>
>>> Is this how it is intended to be used? Of course, it can't be used 
>>> this way now, because chosen takes only a single
>>> ControlConstruct, not a ControlConstructBag. And even if it did take 
>>> a bag, bags are interpreted as unordered, so we
>>> could not enforce a particular order in a Sequence on the chosen 
>>> constructs. So if Choice is to be used in the way
>>> I described, I would suggets the following:
>>>
>>> 1) Remove the range restriction on chosen.
>>> 2) Create two subclasses of Choice, called SingleChoice and 
>>> MultipleChoice.
>>> 3) Add local range restrictions on chosen for these two subclasses, 
>>> so that
>>>   SingleChoice restricts chosen to ControlConstruct, and 
>>> MultipleChoice restricts
>>>   it to ControlConstructBag (or ControlConstructList, to maintain the 
>>> order in which the service consumer chose
>>>   the items).
>>>
>>> I still don't see how you can describe "choose n from m". There is no 
>>> way to express that there can only
>>> be n elements in a ControlConstructBag.
>>>
>>>
>>> /Daniel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> <!--
>>> Choice.
>>>
>>> -->
>>>
>>> <owl:Class rdf:ID="Choice">
>>>  <rdfs:comment>
>>>    Choice is the selection among a bag of Processes.  The choose
>>>    property, takes a choice bag and returns a chosen bag. The 
>>> cardinality
>>>    of the bag can be specified through a restriction to get choose(n).
>>>  </rdfs:comment>
>>>  <rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="#ControlConstruct"/>
>>>  <rdfs:subClassOf>
>>>    <owl:Restriction>
>>>      <owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#chooseFrom"/>
>>>      <owl:cardinality 
>>> rdf:datatype="&xsd;#nonNegativeInteger">1</owl:cardinality>
>>>    </owl:Restriction>
>>>  </rdfs:subClassOf>
>>>  <rdfs:subClassOf>
>>>    <owl:Restriction>
>>>      <owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#chosen"/>
>>>      <owl:cardinality 
>>> rdf:datatype="&xsd;#nonNegativeInteger">1</owl:cardinality>
>>>    </owl:Restriction>
>>>  </rdfs:subClassOf>
>>>
>>> </owl:Class>
>>>
>>> <!-- Note that given Chosen and ChooseFrom, we can define both a control
>>> construct such as sequence or any-order (ex. choose and do chosen in
>>> sequence, or choose and do chosen in parallel) as well as a class that
>>> restricts the size of the Process Bag that corresponds to the
>>> "components" of the chosen and chooseFrom subprocesses using
>>> cardinality, mincardinality, maxcardinality to get choose at least n
>>> from m, choose n from m, and choose at most n from m, etc.  These 
>>> extensions are left as an exercises to the reader :)
>>> -->
>>>
>>> <owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="chooseFrom">
>>>   <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Choice"/>
>>>   <rdfs:range rdf:resource ="#ControlConstructBag"/>
>>> </owl:ObjectProperty>
>>>
>>> <owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="chosen">
>>>   <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Choice"/>
>>>   <rdfs:range rdf:resource ="#ControlConstruct"/>
>>> </owl:ObjectProperty>
>>>
>>> <!-- end choice -->
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
> 

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 2004 17:19:22 UTC