Re: OWL semantics

At 09:30 PM 8/5/2002 +0100, Ian Horrocks wrote:

>Dear All,
>
>Having made a plea for the resolution of the semantics issue, I would
>now like to enter into the argument of what form these semantics should
>take.
...

I do not know whether I am still allowed to respond to an email after a long
period of non-activity but I think the attached paper makes some interesting
contributions on the semantic issues. Especially how it works with the
reification issues.

Guizhen Yang and Michael Kifer
On the Semantics of Anonymous Identity and Reification

Reification and anonymous resources are two of the more intriguing features 
of RDF --- an emerging standard for representing semantic information on 
the Web. Ironically, when RDF was standardized by W3C over three years ago, 
it came without a semantics. There is now growing understanding that a 
Semantic Web language without a semantics is an oxymoron, and a number of 
efforts are directed towards giving RDF a precise semantics. In this paper 
we propose a simple semantics for reification and anonymous resources in 
F-logic -- a frame-based logic language, which is a popular formalism for 
representing and reasoning about semantic information on the Web. The 
choice of F-logic (over RDF) as a basis for our semantics is motivated by 
the fact that F-logic provides a comprehensive solution for the problem of 
integrating frames, rules, and deduction and has been shown to provide an 
effective inference service for RDF.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Dieter Fensel
Tel. (mobil): +31-(0)6-51850619
http://www.google.com/search?q=dieter or http://www.fensel.com