- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2003 14:05:27 +0100
- To: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Cc: www-webont-wg@w3.org
Jim Hendler wrote: > I still await an argument that proving large and complex ontologies > consistent is the only reason d'etre for OWL - I've never believed that > and continue not to. Here's a thought - the NCI ontology was carefully > crafted to be in OWL Lite, and passes various syntax checkers at the > Lite level. It also doesn't use any particularly complex OWL - however, > I suspect proving it consistent would be hard for Lite implementations > (because it contains about 17000 classes - so the problem is simply > bulk, not complexity) - yet several groups I know about are using it > routinely -- other examples include OpenCYC and our wine ontology -- so > I would resist any non-editorial changes caused by a mistaken notion > that consistent checking is more important than other kinds of inference > on the Semantic Web... > Maybe we made the wrong call in limiting the impact of the semantics document on our conformance statements to *consistency*. We could have decided to talk about an RDF/XML document *entailing* another as part of our conformance statements, and then had an *OWL entailment checker* as a further software conformance class. Such concepts would, in my view, make it easier to defend the case that you are making. If we had gone that way, there might still be an issue concerning these tests, and maybe more so concerning other DL non-entailment tests. Jeremy
Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2003 09:07:38 UTC