Re: [OWL] annotations and meta-modelling in OWL 1.1

"Enrico Franconi" <franconi@inf.unibz.it> wrote: 

> On 8 Jan 2006, at 21:05, Jeff Z. Pan wrote:
>> After reading Alan's following email and the proposed OWL 1.1  
>> syntax [1], it seems to me that punning is not a convincing choice  
>> for metamodeling in OWL 1.1. ( For those who are not familiar with  
>> punning - punning means that a name, like Person, can be used as  
>> both an individual and a class and a property.)
> 
> (...)
> 
>> 3.The semantics of punning is not quite intuitive. This can be  
>> shown in the following example. In the following  OWL 1.1 [1]  
>> ontology, Cat and Kitty are used as both classes and individuals.  
>> Although Cat and Kitty are the same individual and Ted is a Cat,  
>> the ontology
>>
>> Class (Cat partial)
>> Class (Kitty partial)
>> SameIndividual (Cat Kitty)
>> Individual (Ted Cat)
>>
>> does not entail that Ted is also a Kitty. This distinguishes the  
>> punning semantics from many other semantics, such as the OWL FA  
>> semantics [2], Hilog semantics [3] and RDF semantics [4].
> 
> I'm not sure that the mentioned alternative to punning are really  
> better:
> 
> - OWL-FA semantics does not exist yet: the last time I saw it was  
> severely bugged; it would break wrt normative RDF; it is not  
> compatible with punning.

Do you mean "being not compatible with punning" is a severe bug of [2]? 


> - Hilog captures more expected inferences than punning but (a) Peter  
> didn't say that it still leave some expected interesting inferences  
> out (see Boris' paper for an example), 

Could you be more specific on what kinds of expected interesting inferences are missing in the Hilog semantics?

>and (b) it requires a re- 
> implementation of the OWL reasoners, as Peter noticed.

> - The only approach that would capture exactly meta-modelling with  
> OWL-DL is undecidable (see Boris' paper) - this fact was hidden by  
> Peter...

Which (only) approach do you mean? As far as I understand, Boris' paper [3] propose two approaches: the context (punning) approach and the Hilog approach. 
 
> As we proved in [5], normative RDF semantics is completely equivalent  
> to punning semantics, so there is no break wrt normative RDF. In [5],  
> we give a complete account of punning semantics with OWL-DL and SPARQL.

OK - I will give it a check.

Cheers,
Jeff

[1] http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/owl/syntax.html
[2] http://www.mindswap.org/2005/OWLWorkshop/sub15.pdf
[3] http://dip.semanticweb.org/documents/Boris-Motik-On-the-Properties-of-Metamodeling-in-OWL.pdf
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/
> [5] Jos de Bruijn, Enrico Franconi, Sergio Tessaris (2005). Logical  
> Reconstruction of normative RDF. Proc. of the Workshosp on OWL  
> Experiences and Directions (OWLED 2005), Galway, Ireland, November 2005.

--
Dr. Jeff Z. Pan (http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~jpan/)
Department of Computing Science, The University of Aberdeen

Received on Monday, 9 January 2006 14:47:01 UTC