Re: (Round 2) Proposed Extensions to OWL

Hi Jon,

You may be right.  In fact, perhaps all this is better expressed in
RuleML, or in MathML.  I do not know.  But I would like to explore this
a bit and see where it takes us.  

Ontologies, of course, are all about expressing *relationships*.  It
seems to me that there *is* a relationship between these two anonymous
resources:

       <rdf:Description>
           <rdf:value>1.0</rdf:value>
           <units>inch</units>
       </rdf:Description>

       <rdf:Description>
           <rdf:value>2.54</rdf:value>
           <units>centimeter</units>
       </rdf:Description>

What that relationship is we are trying to characterize.  The
characterization of that relationship may ultimately involve a
conversion expression. Perhaps the conversion expression, as you say, is
better placed outside an ontology.

I agree with you that the focus should not be on *conversion*, but
rather on "what is the relationship".  

Do you have any thoughts on how to characterize the relationship of the
above two anonymous resources?  /Roger

Jon Hanna wrote:

As far as the general issue of conversion goes. I think such a mechanism
will be useful, indeed it will probably prove essential for some
applications, but I think it would extend OWL's scope too much if we had
it
there.

If it were in OWL I can see people wanting to keep what OWL does now,
but
use another conversion system, or to use OWL's conversion system but use
another application for the ontological stuff it does now. To my mind
this
marks a good point of separation between technologies.

For that matter the kind of processing needed to work with what OWL does
now
and with a conversion application is quite different as well, so from
the
perspective of actually writing APIs and libraries I would see a
practical
advantage in separating them.

Received on Friday, 27 June 2003 08:42:51 UTC