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

On Jan 8, 2006, at 6:10 PM, Enrico Franconi wrote:

> On 8 Jan 2006, at 21:54, Bijan Parsia wrote:
>> From various conversation with people who use OWL Full, and some 
>> introspection, I see two primary, if only current, uses of higher 
>> order like constructs (be they annotations, punning, or some more 
>> full blown species of metamodeling): Metadata about the "symbolic 
>> artefact", e.g., who wrote these axioms, when, when last modified, 
>> etc. and for ontology alignment (e.g., I modeled Wines as a class and 
>> you as an instance). I am not saying that these are the *only* uses 
>> of higher order like constructs, but they are *in my experience* what 
>> get mentioned. Only the latter has potentially interesting modeling 
>> impact, and, in practice, people are just happy to be able to *mark* 
>> these alignments and let some other piece of software (usually not a 
>> reasoner!) take care of, e.g., conversions of data between 
>> ontologies.
>
> Mmmhh, you are missing the *real* usages in the two biggest 
> communities in informations system.

That may be true, but I apparently don't talk to such people :)

> In conceptual modelling, people do use metamodelling to characterise 
> their object languages (I really don't like this, but this is a fact): 
> see UML!

This is true, but they aren't, in my experience, using OWL or OWL Full. 
That could change.

> In database systems, pleople use aggregation functions to characterise 
> the values of properties of sets of tuples: see SQL! That is, you can 
> have a property of a set of tuples defined in some way (e.g., average 
> of the values of a property of all elements of the set of all tuples 
> having some other property, etc).

Yep. But are these people wanting to use OWL for anything? UML maybe, 
though I've not seen *UMLers* step up and request this stuff. You're 
experience might vary. If there were a clear UML application (ICOMM? 
:)) that we were targeting as a kind of killer app for owl, I would 
find that example more compelling. But then I'd want a plan for 
sweeping the UML folks off their feet.

Or more simply, I don't know what the dominant set of users for robust 
metamodeling are thus have a hard time assessing the utility of 
standardizing various proposals. Annotations (with full punning) are 
ubiquitous and highly desired and (mostly) easy. So I find them 
reasonable for 1.1.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Monday, 9 January 2006 02:37:26 UTC