Re: DAML-S expressiveness challenge #1

[David Martin]

>  ...
> For now, I'd like to throw in a few general remarks at a higher level of
> abstraction.  First, I think my observation, about certain "recipes" for
> expressing things in DAML+OIL, that they are too baroque to be useful,
> comes up in large part because we are asking the language to represent
> things that (to my knowledge) a KR language isn't normally used to
> represent - namely, processes/algorithms.
>
> In our business, processes are most commonly described using programming
> languages, and programming languages have lots of special features, many
> of which were designed with process representation in mind.  I'm talking
> about the familiar elements such as variables, procedure calls and
> parameter passing, nested scopes, assignment statements, unification (in
> Prolog at least), various constructors/accessors for compound terms, and
> all the rest, many of which are not available in DAML+OIL.
>
> To my mind, it's an open question whether it makes any sense to try and
> describe processes using the expressive mechanisms of a
> description-logic-based language.  If anyone knows of any work related
> to this, I'd be interested to learn of it.  It may be that the gap
> between what a process-modeler needs to express (conveniently,
> intuitively, and compactly) and what a description logic is designed to
> express easily is too big to make the effort worthwhile.
>

Well, John Sowa showed how to do Petri nets with conceptual graphs, so it
ought to be possible.  It's probably more a matter of getting an expressive
and readable langugae that's still machine-usable than a question of
possibility.

Cheers,

Tom P