Requirements Document -was- Re: GUIDE: examples

Guus Screiber wrote:
>I would like to make a shortlist of concrete ontology examples that we
>can use within the guidelines work. 
>
>I hope to start this week with representing my antique furniture
>examples with the OWL lite constructs to see how far I can get.

I assume that this is a reference to the Multimedia collections use
case in the requirements document.  Actually, I had some problems with
this use case.  I found it to be quite ambiguous regarding the properties
that were being discussed.  The result was that the kinds of searches that
might be expected to be based on the indexing information inferred from
these properties would return lots of false hits (or wrong answers) when
applying this pattern just slightly more generally.  Maybe that was part 
of the point of the use case, but if so that should be made clear, and the 
implied requirements for user control of assumptions or acceptable 
inferences should be made explicit.

What am I going on about?  Well in the case of styles, date.created for
the style says nothing about date.created for an individual having that
style (that is: the range of dates associated with the creation of the
style is much smaller than the range of dates associated with the creation
of instances of the style).  Take the example of a multiple listing search 
in the mid-Atlantic of the US for houses built in our Colonial era. Making 
the inference that anything in the Colonial style would likely be of that 
vintage, would lead to hundreds of false hits and quite possible no true 
hits!  This is not a special case, this is typical of many styles of 
antiques and collectables as well.  

What this seems to say is that someone making these searches needs to
be able to view the inferences (and default knowledge) to be used in 
the search and either reject or refine them to achieve the desired search 
quality.  Is that it?  If so, can this elaboration be included in english 
text in the Guideline example?  Can we also include it in the next iteration
of the requirements document?  While we are at it, can we also either define 
or delete the "culture" relation/attribute?

-Evan

Received on Wednesday, 13 March 2002 14:51:13 UTC