RE: Annotations and entailments

Peter Crowther:
> Is it 'incorrect', though?  Seems to me this is the same problem as
> whether the following two files are 'identical':

> FileA:
> int main () { return 0; /* Do nothing */ }

> FileB:
> int main () { return 0; /* Successful termination */ }

No, not at all.
Classes in both RDF and OWL are intensional.

So two incomplete ontologies:

FileA:
<owl:Class rdf:about="http://example.org/#People">
   <rdfs:comment>Network Inference employees</rdfs:comment>
</owl:Class>

FileB:
<owl:Class rdf:about="http://example.org/#People">
   <rdfs:comment>Expert ontologists</rdfs:comment>
</owl:Class>

have different intensions before we start worrying about the extensions.
While currently any OWL DL interpretation of the one is an interpretation of 
the other, this is problematic precisely because of the failure to connect 
with the real world; where the coincidence of "Expert ontologists" and 
"Network Inference employees" is at best a fortuitous fact about this world 
rather than a necessary truth about all possible worlds.

The intent of the following in FIleC is unclear unless we import either FileA 
or FileB (or both).

<eg:People>
   <eg:name>Peter Crowther</eg:name>
</eg:People>


Hmm, maybe the C analogy isn't wholly mistaken - FileA seems to be finished, 
whereas FileB appears to be a stub. Calling the resulting program within a 
shell script results in two very different situations. FileA may result in a 
shell script that is either correct or not; whereas FileB would result in a 
shell script that is not yet finished, because one if its parts still needs 
work.

Jeremy

Received on Sunday, 19 January 2003 15:17:26 UTC