Re: [OWL] annotations and meta-modelling in OWL 1.1

On 8 Jan 2006, at 21:05, Jeff Z. Pan wrote:
> After reading Alan's following email and the proposed OWL 1.1  
> syntax [1], it seems to me that punning is not a convincing choice  
> for metamodeling in OWL 1.1. ( For those who are not familiar with  
> punning - punning means that a name, like Person, can be used as  
> both an individual and a class and a property.)

(...)

> 3.The semantics of punning is not quite intuitive. This can be  
> shown in the following example. In the following  OWL 1.1 [1]  
> ontology, Cat and Kitty are used as both classes and individuals.  
> Although Cat and Kitty are the same individual and Ted is a Cat,  
> the ontology
>
> Class (Cat partial)
> Class (Kitty partial)
> SameIndividual (Cat Kitty)
> Individual (Ted Cat)
>
> does not entail that Ted is also a Kitty. This distinguishes the  
> punning semantics from many other semantics, such as the OWL FA  
> semantics [2], Hilog semantics [3] and RDF semantics [4].

I'm not sure that the mentioned alternative to punning are really  
better:

- OWL-FA semantics does not exist yet: the last time I saw it was  
severely bugged; it would break wrt normative RDF; it is not  
compatible with punning.

- Hilog captures more expected inferences than punning but (a) Peter  
didn't say that it still leave some expected interesting inferences  
out (see Boris' paper for an example), and (b) it requires a re- 
implementation of the OWL reasoners, as Peter noticed.

- The only approach that would capture exactly meta-modelling with  
OWL-DL is undecidable (see Boris' paper) - this fact was hidden by  
Peter...

As we proved in [5], normative RDF semantics is completely equivalent  
to punning semantics, so there is no break wrt normative RDF. In [5],  
we give a complete account of punning semantics with OWL-DL and SPARQL.

cheers
--e.

[5] Jos de Bruijn, Enrico Franconi, Sergio Tessaris (2005). Logical  
Reconstruction of normative RDF. Proc. of the Workshosp on OWL  
Experiences and Directions (OWLED 2005), Galway, Ireland, November 2005.

Received on Sunday, 8 January 2006 20:31:18 UTC